One of the exciting things about drawing is that it can show you places that have never existed and bring you face to face with the unreal. Gregory Martens’ exhibition at Grove Gallery, “Out From the Darkness,” travels lands that are sometimes macabre, but often ironic and humorous. All of the drawings, prints and paintings on view carry Martens’ remarkable stamp as a draftsman and storyteller.
Most are black ink on paper, with supple skill in creating dense creations with characters both real and fantastic. For the artist, this body of work is a representation of breaking free from constraints, or as he puts it, “letting go of the influence and pressures of academic training and practice and just trying to channel the teenaged kid back in the 1970s who loved drawing for endless hours and listening to rock and roll on the 8-track.”
The drawing called Distractions reflects this with cheeky humor. In a crowded room, a drum kit, guitars, a sulky baby, plus skeletons of people and animals hang out like lingering apparitions, crowded together like the landscape of the imagination. They gain attention through the act of drawing. They represent the things of Martens’ mind; as he says, they are all “vying for some place in my psyche, longing for center stage in the next picture I make.”
He is an artist whose work is very contemporary, and echoes the work of artists like R. Crumb while channeling predecessors like the Renaissance masters Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. Mirror Mirror is unerringly current and political, showing Donald Trump looking into a bathroom mirror while a vile monster gazes back. It recalls the story of Dorian Gray and a piece by Ivan Albright that hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Martens’ quip about regaining a sense of freedom is not about nostalgia, but instead regaining that feeling for the present. Traditional technologies like drawing have as much relevance as ever, as they are creations where anything is possible and anything may be drawn from out of the darkness.
Through Nov. 3 at Grove Gallery, 832 S. Fifth St.
