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| Technique: | oil paint | |
| Date of exhibition: | May 10 - June 16, 2002 |
Solo-exhibition Martin Stam
parallel there was a group exhibition of 35 realists, each with three pieces.
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Martin Stam received his training at the Royal Academy for Visual Arts in The Hague. One of his teachers was Co Westerik. Due to circumstances he was forced to combine his work as an artist with a job as a teacher. But this awkward duality ended recently. And if - after all this - one is still in control of one's brushes, the artist has won, but at a price that is always very high. This might be the very reason for Martin Stam to try to escape from the everyday world. And through his painting he found doors and hatches, which turned out to be entrances to be parallel worlds. At first glance they look familiar, but upon closer consideration they are cause for surprise. These places are ruled by the mild melancholy of lost youth, lost innocence, lost dreams, but still the shadow of reality is hanging over them. The thirty works in this exhibition have all been made during the last ten years. Finger-II is a key-work. There she lays: woman, but also still a girl. She is resting and dreaming herself right through the skincells of reality, and effortlessly she puts her finger into another world. The little angels too, winged boys really, who seem to come out of the sky in the tricolour triptych Pondering on Holland, don't come down on earth but land just outside the picture. When red, white and blue are put in the right order of our national flag, an ongoing pendular motion seems to appear. They skim past our world without making a sound and it takes a very watchful eye to perceive the miracle. Words tend to dissolve the magic, but in brushstrokes the magic hardens. Once we are away from the paintings, an endless film unrolls, presented to us by Martin Stam in sometimes no more than a single picture. |
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 Pondering on Holland-1, Martin Stam, o/c, 50x50cm.  Pondering on Holland-2, Martin Stam, o/c, 50x50cm.  Pondering on Holland-3, Martin Stam, o/c, 50x50cm. |