In JM Marty's work we find ourselves facing two languages and two completely different quests. Initially his work is mainly pictoric, influenced by his art training and essentially by surrealism. However, that same need to work with images on a bidimensional surface leads him at some point to the rearranging visual elements to move to a completely geometric field. We could metaphorically say that Marty develops a process similar to the creation of the universe itself.
From chaos to geometric order and then to the creation of new beings.
Marty’s relentless aim for creation prevents him from staying too long in the same language. This random exploration has a purpose, and that is to give life.
His approach to traditional trades allows him not only to rescue the craft, but also to become the cotton picker, the mineral cave explorer, the weaver, the artist and later the father.
In the sprouting stones series, his search to connect vital elements with the intention of intervening in the logical phases of nature becomes evident. He turns into a commissioner, ordering the flow of life itself. Marty is able to bring to our presence peculiar new characters; half stone, half vegetal fibre.
The artist seeks through the textures and organic forms of his pieces to endow each one with a particular and unique character, being impossible to deny there is a heart beating inside each one of them.
"It's been 9 years of studying popular craft techniques and applying them, dialoguing and creating activities with artisans and specialising in work with vegetal fibres, wool and other vernacular raw materials."
José Marty, December 1981, Santiago de Chile. He currently lives in Copiapó, a town in the north of Chile where he develops a major part of the creative process that we are currently seeing.
His father, of French background, played an important role in the multicultural vision always present in his work. At the age of four he lived in Paris while his parents tried to make a way for themselves in this city. Later he returned to Chile, and again, at the age of 18, life would lead him to experience a stay in Paris, a city with which he has an emotional connection rooted in his family line.
"Paris has always been in my subconscious mind, my french ancestry comes from Marseilles, to which my mother's Mapuche origins are added".
He claims to be influenced by the German philosophers of Romanticism, but confesses that Surrealism and especially Dalí are fundamental elements in the birth of his creative work. For a long time he considered the latter to be a cliché due to his training at the University of Chile, where certain names were not considered relevant by academics.
For personal reasons he moved to Copiapó, where, immersed in nature, in the solemnity of the desert, he has completely transformed his expressive techniques and his way of life.
He has exhibited his work in various places like Chile, Argentina, France and the United Kingdom, always feeling partly fragmented by the cultural differences that coexist in his being, which are the driving forces to create art pieces that are worthy representatives of a new world.