| TOO MANY WORDS |
| Onyis Martin - Kenya |
About the Exhibition
For almost a decade, Onyis Martin has been intrigued by walls, particularly those in public spaces, and the stories that they tell. Especially interesting for Onyis are those on which, over time, there has been an accumulation of textual and visual material as the walls are painted and drawn on, scratched, eroded, plastered with posters and banners, and many other such processes that are evidence of a human presence in those spaces.
This accumulation of marks and matter speaks to the passage of time, the events that unfold in and around the spaces demarcated by the walls, and the actions of the people who have inhabited or moved through these spaces, each of them attempting to claim or use these spaces for different ends.
Onyis interprets and transfers these talking walls onto large scale canvases, which are multicolored, semi abstract compositions, commenting in his way on social, political, environmental and societal issue.
He refers to the quote: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” , famously attributed to Pablo Picasso.
