martin battye -about time-

MANDELL’S GALLERY 1

MARTIN BATTYE– about t ime –

2 MARTIN BATTYE

MARTIN BATTYE– about t ime –

Entrain I 19x14cm

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I first met Martin at the old Bally Shoe Factory, where his studio was based. He was, at the time, the sole occupant of this vast space with its howling vents and the threat of break-ins; I thought this guy must have nerves of steel.

The entire factory later became the venue for the annual Norwich Fringe Arts Festival which ran successfully there for several years.

Martin showed me his studio space or rather studio spaces, a number of rooms completely stacked with his work, some dating back to early figurative paintings. I was given a personal retrospective viewing.

This was the start of our association, thereafter I gradually discovered what a complex and multi-faceted character Martin is. Throughout his life he has managed to combined a successful business career with family life while retaining his passion for literature, music but above all his art.

JOHN ALLEN Mandell’s Gallery


During the twentieth century, abstract art has been thought of as a suitable place where art forms are shown in their bareness, where historical echoes of the withdrawal of God find one of its fields of expression, a means to consider the aesthetic experience as a representation of the ineffableness.

While these ideas may glide through the work of Martin Battye, reviewing his work of the past few years we find that his paintings project one of the central issues of contemporary art: the distinction between abstract and figurative art as a secondary affair, and that every painting is a battle that is being waged between colour and composition. An iconoclastic battle that breaks through Cézanne’s montagne Sainte-Victoire to the black paintings of Rothko, at least.

Martin Battye has gone from landscape painting and hints of landscapes, more or less geometric, to the recent abstract compositions. Yet his artistic demands remain equally strict. His new oil paintings on paper lead us to a reality understood as outline and fragment. With abstract compositions in hardened turquoise blues and Indian yellows, lines that pass through the surface; the artist wants to break the unitary idea of the gaze in front of a painting and mark the incisions of a lifetime.

The fact that we do not find in his work a concrete and cold abstraction but the warmth of large patches of vivid colours, perhaps is due to the influence of 1950s existentialism; a period so important to some artists of his generation. Nowadays art requires the viewer to focus on these core values beyond the issues of genres and themes – possibly it has always been so. The simplicity and lightness of a medium such as paper also helps to understand his artistic work as a laboratory where everything is yet to be done, a place where you have to be open to the surprise of colours and its rhythms. In short, the bare freedom. Because the colour of every moment is a joy.

Dr HELENA GOLANÓ Writer and Curator

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Nearly all the paintings shown here are all from the last twelve months, a year in which I gave up the day job and left the company I began some thirty years ago.

During that time, there has been some frustration, juggling painting with a fairly demanding job, managing some success, sometimes falling short in both.

I had hoped and maybe expected some kind of release akin to the effervescent pop of a champagne cork. Instead there followed a period of some flatness and if not introspection, certainly some reflection.

I suspect some threads of these thoughts run through these pictures.

All paintings are oil on paper unless otherwise stated.

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16 . I . 2013 64x52cm


29. XII . 2012 64x54cm

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Fall 57x43cm


Push Pull 34x27cm

Dance II 30x26cm

Late Spring 28x23cm

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In correspondence, good friends, Prunela Clough and Keith Vaughan, would share thoughts on how to get started with painting: he would drip and drizzle paint over bare paper, she would upturn canvases on the studio floor and scuff and kick them about in the hope that something would be picked up to work its beginnings.

Frank Auerbach would violently express his impatience with his paintings by any arbitrary action – slash at it, flick gobbets of paint – anything to kick it into some sort of life.

Andrew Lambith in a recent introduction to the work of John Kiki describes how the artist’s acts and actions are needed to ignite the work.

Entrain II 20x14cm

Study 21x20cm


Bonnard put it well, ‘it’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.’It is at that point when some sort of life or ignition starts to emerge within the painting that I feel the need to retreat from the work: it’s beginning to say something, like a growing child, is speaking for itself, it’s on its own.

This point is where one has less and less to do with the work, where the medium, the materials are assuming a life of their own, where decisions made are outside consciousness, and when slowly the cold light returns.

Tidal I 19x16cm

Dieppe 19x19cm

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Onshore 61x59cm


17. III . 2013 52x48cm

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Tidal II 24x27cm

Tidal Study II 19x14cmTidal Study I 22x22cm

17.VIII .2013 36x24cm

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On Yarmouth Sands 39x36cm


... and so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of emotion.

TS Eliot East Coker

Before Ebb II 20x15cm

Ebb 40x30cm

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Redy 18x14cm

Study 20x19cm

Drift II 2013 Oil on Canvas 100x80cm

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Gorleston 20x19cm

Gorleston 20x19cm


Gorleston Sands 23x21cm

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Despite getting to ninety one, the enlightenment philospher, Thomas Hobbes is best remembered for his pithy – life of man, nasty, brutish and short. He interestingly noted, way in advance of the current neurologists, that we are matter in motion... life in a constant state of flux and motion, the human organism always in response to its senses and its body in the space it occupies.

While those in the Judeo-Christian tradition see all life starting off in the Word, in some Hindu myth, (they have many) it begins in a deep rumbling vibration and from its sound life and creation and a new (for they have many) universe is in being.

22 . IX . 2013 62x56cm


Dance 81x58cm

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Above: North Sea I 47x66cm Below: North Sea II 41x57cm


Paul Klee said many wonderful things about painting life and art, my favourite being, ‘all art is a memory of our dark origins whose fragments live in the artist forever.’ To me this seems the flip side of his 1914 trip to Tunisia with Macke and Moilliet giving rise to his chromatic epiphany, ‘colour has taken hold of me... colour and I are one. I am a painter.’

In My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk we find the same being said, ‘painting is remembering the blackness. The great masters perceived that colour and sight arose from darkness and longed to returnto Allah’s blackness by means of colour. All masters seek that profound void within colour and outside time.’

Hmmm... indeed, that profound void that seems constantly to edge into vacuity, that’s ‘outside time’ that we give so little to. Next time in the Tate, or wher-ever, stand back and observe the time given to a single picture. Rarely will anything be given the three or so minutes a pop song lasts.

This show may be about three facets of time: my own and recognising the fact that now there is more behind me than in front. Secondly, the temporal aspects of painting; how they are made in time and how time can be conveyed and communicated within process and surface. And lastly, the now of time: the time we live in, inhabit and are part of.

If some of the above are there and alive in the paintings it will, to me, be a small measure of their success.

Fall I 20x20cm

Fall II 20x20cm

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Bawdsey am 34x29cm


Tidal III 19x16cm Bawdsey pm 18x15cm

Before Ebb I 20x15cm On Train Near Diss 24x21cm

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Untitled II 65x52cm


Many of the paintings owe a debt to Japanese Haiku poetry. It characteristically collides two separate thoughts or ideas in a highly compressed form of seventeen sylables and is traditionally rooted in either the seasons or nature.

Such compression and sometimes economy of means in painting can hover between the edges of meaning and banality – the failure rate is high, very high.

‘Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, writes Haruki Murakami, in Kafka on the Beach, ‘where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.’

So back to hovering again, back to doubt and uncertainty and thinking of Japan reminds me of Van Goghs’ comment in a letter to his brother Theo, ‘it is not possible to study Japanese art without becoming much happier.’

When younger I was deeply taken with the now seriously unfashionable Marxist philosopher, Ernst Fischer, who wrote in The Necessity of Art, ‘in order to be an artist it is necessary to seize, hold and transform experience into memory, memory into expression, material into form.’

Words I still, many years on, find worth remembering.

Left: Shift I 13x18cm

Right: Shift II 16x16cm

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Manningtree 41x41cm


Queenborough 42x33cm

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MARTIN BATTYE

Born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1952.

Attended Winchester and Sunderland Schools of Art. Studied under, among others, John Bellamy and Barry Hirst; worked, for a while with John Latham.

First exhibited in 1967 at the Deben Gallery with, among others, Cavendish Morton. Has continued to exhibit in a number of group shows from the Northern Young Contemporaries, to the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Eastern Open and many others including Mandell’s.

Recent solo shows have been at Ashton Graham, in Ipswich, the Chappel Galleries in Colchester, King of Hearts, the Theatre Royal and the University Hospital in Norwich.

Before starting Kirton Healthcare in 1980, he worked variously as a teacher, psychiatric nurse and at sea.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Member of the Court of Anglian Ruskin University, the Norwich 20 Group and sits on the committee of the East Anglian Art Fund.

Design: Selwyn Taylor Limited Production: Rachel Allen Print: Swallowtail Print

Front Cover: Drift 74x71cm Back Cover: River II 80x57cmInside Cover: Flood 48x75cm

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PAINTING IS THE SILENCE OF THOUGHT

AND THE MUSIC OF SIGHT

Orhan Pamuk My Name Is Red

TRADITIONAL &CONTEMPORARY FINE ART

Mandell’s Gallery Elm Hill, Norwich, Norfolk NR3 1HN+44(0)103 [email protected]

martin battye -about time-

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