Beautyfulbizarre magazine
March 2015
“Art is an essential and unique vice of mankind. A positive balance on the scale of reality.”
Martine Johanna
For Martine Johanna freedom is not so much a destination as it is a journey. Those first steps were trod early when she crossed the oppressive boundaries of her small childhood community in the Netherlands to attend ArtEZ in Holland for fashion design.
“True fashion remains just outside of reality, as my work does as well. I don’t portray everyday reality; I portray an internal reality that deals with dualities in character, the hero and the anti-hero.”
Though successful as a women’s-wear designer, she found the corporate mentality and routine constricting. But what she also found was that after work the experience of painting - to have full control of a project and to express herself without limitation - was liberating. Quitting her day job to become a full-time artist was her next step for emancipation. She is now the director of her business, her time, and her creativity. In this space she can explore the recesses of her morals, her beliefs, her beauty, and her sanity.
Evoking inspiration from studies into the psyche, myths, superstitions, photography, film, nature, and museums, she explores the tension between morality and sanity. This reflects for Martine the “fragility of the human”, and the “presumed wickedness from my own frame of mind, without sexualizing it or only portraying beauty” as depicted in her series Grand Illusion of Sanity. It is in this series that Martine steps across the borders of psychic limitations and looks inward for truth, and might I suggest, illusion. We associate beauty with truth, but what happens when we look into the subconscious of our being? Do we not find truth within? Is that truth not beauty? Such truth questions beauty, sensibility, and logic - and such truth is distinct in Martine’s work.
Light pastels. Shy female forms. Soft light. This is what you see on the canvases painted by Martine Johanna. Look into the painting and you will sense the deconstruction of a social and psychological network of limitation. In Dear Darkness Martine succumbs to the dark unknown. Nightmusic and Melancholy are threaded by light and dark,
But the duality is not of black and white, but of the internal and the external. In The Hunted, much like Kokoshka’s The Tempest, the consumption of adoration and the devastation of possession are laid upon one another. “Art is an essential and unique vice of mankind; A positive balance on the scale of reality. As an artist you can’t hope for change through what you create, yet it reflects a reaction of life’s absurdity, beauty, normalcy or despair. That is why art reflects so perfectly our state of mind in history.”
Martine’s artistic process is her spiritual ritual. Those times when she works morning to night without significant breaks, going days and weeks on end, are the moments that drew her away from the small community into Amsterdam. They are the moments that drew her out of an office into a studio. They are the moments that can be the reason why some people stay in a small community or in an office. This is a lawless realm of self-reflection where, in her words, “nothing is strange, nothing is wrong”. We search for freedom outside of ourselves, but Martine has discovered where freedom is unlimited, and as shown in Under The Moon, to be free one must lie deep within the darkness of their nature with both the beauty and the flaws.
Martine currently lives and works in Amsterdam, which she describes as a place that is “free and where not a lot is strange.” Since 2007 she has been a part of 36 exhibitions, including solo and duo shows, collaborated on zines, and is also represented by Unit Creative Management through which she continues making contributions to the fashion industry through illustration. She has already started off 2015 with a collaboration for the PRISMA Collective show at Spoke Art in San Francisco, along with several projects soon to be announced. What can be assured is that her work will continue to unveil the illusion of the greatest duality - freedom and imprisonment.
“I’m not enlightened, nor do I believe in enlightenment. I think accepting yourself for who you are, with flaws and being thankful for your time here is enough.”
Text by: Decadence Darling
