2021 MARTINE POPPE
Martine Poppe’s recent paintings are based on digital photographs she took from airplane windows while flying to and from art exhibitions. They preserve happy accidents of sunlight, cloud iridescence, lens flare, and other moments of evanescent beauty discovered in the quiet, introspective interludes between each departure and arrival.
Poppe pushes the envelope of photorealism beyond the domain of the literal with measured, scalloped brushwork that allows the paintings to be read as abstract compositions. Many of her titles, such as The Way You Make Me Feel and I Don’t Know If I Could Ever Go Without, suggest the private thoughts and longings of cloud-gazing travelers. Since she began making this series in 2018, Poppe says many people have approached her unprompted to show her their own cloud photographs they’ve taken while traveling. She is fascinated by how such a solitary activity as cloud-gazing from the window seat of an airplane can become a shared experience that connects us to a larger sociality.
Poppe paints on what she calls “the underskirts of the Old Masters,” using the same specialized fabric that conservators use for restoring fragile Renaissance paintings. Although this translucent fabric may appear delicate, it is designed to be strong and durable. By using it as the support for her paintings, Poppe affirms the power of quiet resiliency as an alternative to more overt representations of strength in art. The translucency of the material also mirrors the translucency of the clouds, creating an intriguing dialectic between the materiality of the artwork and the immateriality of its subject.
Poppe’s cloudscapes represent a synthesis of many opposites: softness and strength, transience and permanence, the natural and the virtual, photorealism and abstraction. Although grounded in the familiar, they point to moments of beauty that transcend the mundane, allowing for the prospect of shared experience while providing space for solitary awe.