Simon Martin

As Paris emerged from lockdown in late spring 2020, hollyhocks bloomed across the city in pinks, blues, and whites as sun-bleached and delicate as Simon Martin’s palette for “Ce qui dort sous les petals” (Those Who Sleep Under the Petals), his second solo show at Jousse Enterprise. In the first room of the gallery, a pair of canvases, Des roses ont poussé dans les joints du carrelage I and II (Hollyhocks Have Come Up Between the Tiles, all works 2023) hang opposite each other, both rendering the tenacious wildflower as tall as a man. Martin conjures a dreamlike landscape, which he anchors to the earth through the veins of bloodred in a small untitled watercolor, and through the billows of acid green that flare in almost every one of the nine paintings on display.

Like the resilient hollyhocks, the male figure surfaces consistently throughout Martin’s work. In Comme une statue sur une île déserte (Like a Statue on a Deserted Island), the artist renders the weight of his subject’s exhaustion as he rests his head on a low wall. His back is turned to the viewer, and a glimpse of skin glows in the gap between his T-shirt and the top of his loose trousers. This tender observation radiates in La douche au crépuscule (Shower at Dawn), in which Martin emphasizes his canvas’s vaporous effect, capturing steam rising from a warm shower at daybreak. There’s a hazy boundary between what’s intentionally hidden from view and what we simply neglect to notice, but the artist’s attentive eye gives us hope.