"In his negotiation of a foreign land, Webb uses cement and objects found in travel to explore humanity and naturalism, time and timelessness, the intangible and the concrete."
"The first object he looked upon, that object he became."
Cement and mixed media panels commissioned for The Mercer Building, Walnut Creek, CA. Installed May 2008. The title is a line from the Walt Whitman poem, "There was a child went forth".
EAST BAY EXPRESS : CRITIC'S CHOICE REVIEW "Best Western" by Martin Webb at Esteban Sabar Gallery
The open road exercises the same mythic pull on the American psyche that the frontier did, so it's interesting to get an English artist's take on our dromomania, our travel bug. In his show at Esteban Sabar Gallery, Best Western (named after the motels, of course), Martin Webb records his impressions of going mobile, but in the curious medium of concrete (pigmented with acrylic), which is entirely appropriate, on second thought. He also literally impresses into the paintings the souvenirs of his journeys: keys, gears, and other industrial effluvia are buried in the liquid matrix and later sanded and buffed back to the light of day. These paintings are both maps and archaeological digs; considering the paradoxical medium, they're also delicately poetic, with symbols for houses and trees midway between Klee pictograms and Department of Transportation signage. The silhouetted figures will remind viewers of Jasper Johns' and William Wiley's phantom self-portraits, but in such paintings as "Super 8," "Headlight," "Walgreen," "West Riding," and "Stage Coach," Webb depicts America's automotive landscape and culture with a lyricism that we lead-footed Yanks mostly miss.
- DeWitt Cheng
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All images and website content copyright Martin Webb 2007