Martin Honasan’s paintings often begin unfurled horizontally:  on the floor, pavement, ground, shore, or any surface where the canvas can be marked or stained by the environment. The canvas accumulates dripped paint and other media, such as stains from salt water, sand, dirt and dust; or it is distressed and weathered from wind, rain, and humidity. When the canvas surface has dried, he tears it into smaller pieces and mounts the shreds on another upright stretched canvas. He refers to albums of photographs he has taken of family and friends throughout the years until he finds faces that would match the textures on the surface of each piece. With acrylics, he would render each portrait as if they are a continuation of the patterns. The whole process, starting from the damage-based methods of staining, to the mounting, and then to rendering the portraits is, ironically, a restorative process, a wishful reversal of time.  In many ways, he is rebuilding these people.

 

For this series, Honasan uses canvas shreds that have been gathering paint in his studio for more than a decade, some of which have already been mounted, stretched and bracketed together in triptychs years ago. The nature of time, finitude, and transience of life are recurring themes in his work. The immense existential reality of time and its mystery forces him to retreat into introspection and examine his place within over 4 decades of living on earth. The Distance Between Two Points is about a specific thread, a transitional period in Honasan’s life that has led him to traverse vast regions within his own mind and heart, expressed in the six pieces that comprise this exhibit.

 

Rend your Heart is a portrait of Honasan’s cousin who recently became the youth pastor of their small church in Canada, taking after his father who was the leader of the church for many years until he passed away in 2000. When this uncle was still alive, he would pray for Honasan’s family, keeping in touch with them during a pre-internet era, back when countries where much less connected. 

 

Horizon and Forge were both rendered this year on triptychs assembled in 2017 but made with decade-old fragments. One is a self-portrait; the other one is based on Honasan’s friend Franco, who was much like a mentor and an older brother during his young, carefree single years. Franco also helped him transition into married life.

 

One Another is based on Honasan’s wife. Most of his work is based on her face, but aside from all the romantic (and valid) notions surrounding the act of painting one’s spouse, it also highlights the fact that most of his waking hours are spent with her—“to be married is to literally give one’s whole self.”

 

The Margins of my Thoughts is a 28-foot diptych mounted on two 36” x 24” stretched canvases. It stands as an illustration of the limits of human knowledge and scope of his senses. 

 

Remembrance/Monument is a 100-foot piece composed of large fragments of canvas sheets from previous exhibits glued together in one long strip. It places this large accumulation from the past as a symbol for the grand scale of time, the beginning and ending of all things, and an overarching wall that dwarfs all the fleeting moments, succession of events in his life, and all his issues: his loves, hatred, joys, sorrows, pain, failures and triumphs.

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-Stephanie Frondoso