MARTIN LUBNER

This body of work was prodded by the noted neuro scientist, Antonio Damasio’s book  “Self Comes To Mind” and the psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas’ phrase  “the unthought known”.  Both construct a reciprocal  relationship between the unconscious, consciousness, the self and mind.*

Looking back, my work, my world (as everyone’s) is surrounded by shapes, colours, people, objects, feelings and thoughts.  For each of us we own them. It is my shaping, my colouration, my love, my cups and saucers, my toothbrush, my fears and joys, and my analysis of the social world and concepts from art history.

Somehow, the world of Katrina and of tsunamis swept over the image of Cezanne’s clock, Gericault’s Raft, Marat’s hidden knee, my paintbrush and banal toothbrushes, my wife’s hat, a baseball bat, and my paint table housing a drawing of three ages of people and a canvas with an image of an apple,  (the diabetic snack) and breasts.  Then came floating beams, the sunken black ship, an impossible horizon of the sea, two bent nails, Man Ray’s lips, last weeks’ wine corks in a gentle swell, a black paint tube recalling Holbein’s “Dead Christ” and a wooden palette that my father gave me when I was 17.

But, all of this is narrative without acknowledgement of the complicity made by my dialogue with material, paint in all its forms.  My past concerns with the physicality and tangibility of objects and the erosion of time continues; a great sticky, congealed palimpsest of my private and social world.

*Apologies to Antonio Damasio and Christopher Bollas for such an over simplification of their arcane and literate work.

Martin Lubner
2011