Gerard Marti

"Elvis Shelby Mugshot" Print on canvas 39 x 36 inch Ed. of 75 by Gerard Marti

2019

Born and raised on the French Riviera, Gerard Marti attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, where at the age of 18 he studied Fine Art and the History of Arts. A couple of years later, he moved to Paris to pursue a career in the music industry. First as a songwriter, then as a record producer and video director for E.M.I. Records is one of the largest record companies in Europe. In 1991, fed up with the changing music industry, he moved to the United States, making Maui his home. In Hawaii, Gerard Marti finally went back to where he first started and began painting again. In a typical style of Postmodern Eclecticism, Symbolism, and Pop Art, he creates paintings in a style that collapses into fragmented components, pop music, advertising, technology, and urban street poetry. Marti is engaged in an exercise of free association, where images and icons of contemporary culture collide, in a haphazard juxtaposition of style and traditions that give his work a distinctly European flavor. “Pop Art should be glamorous, expendable, mass-produced, and popular". "My pieces combine all of these elements, people who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images," I question the idea of authority and the traditional role of the artist. I like to take something from the everyday world and transform it into art. Most of my paintings involve the post-modernist technique of appropriation of anonymous images. My inspiration comes from the imagery of consumer society and popular culture.” Marti’s works combine anonymous images of women from film stills, advertisements, and erotic icons. It is sexy, gimmicky, and glamorous. Some of the pieces might shock the viewer by forcing them to face their mortality. “The role of an artist is to make the invisible, visible. Art is an open window in your mind.”