Chris Martin

 Drawing by Dan Perjovich for Spike

Drawing by Dan Perjovich for Spike

Many people are anxious that the growing class divide in the art world and the succession of record-breaking prices paid for contemporary art endanger the belief system supporting it. But why is nobody worried about money itself? Isn’t what happens at an auction that money celebrates its freedom, its release from the burden of being a means of comparison? Is art the new money? On a currency that lives from the bank of the gaze, into which we all make payments.

 What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?, 2010-2012 Glitter, oil, collage on canvas 137,2 x 124,5 cm Photo: Moritz Frei © Chris Martin Courtesy of Chris Martin and KOW, Berlin

What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?, 2010-2012
Glitter, oil, collage on canvas
137,2 x 124,5 cm
Photo: Moritz Frei
© Chris Martin
Courtesy of Chris Martin and KOW, Berlin

It’s undeniable that Chris Martin’s paintings resemble »outsider art«. Yet I like them not for being intuitive, or spiritual, or liberated from convention – although they are all these things – but because they are affectionate.