John Martin Gallery is pleased to present Josh Dorman’s new exhibition «The naming of Things», on Thursday 8 November, 6.00 - 8.00 pm.

I generate fields of visual detritus, then bury and re-excavate, wander between flesh, feather, metal, bone, rock. Everywhere, I forage for peculiar old books – like a hunter, or a botanist. I find disused knowledge in diagrams, charts, in engravings of animals unseen by their portrayers and viewers. I float in a Turner sky, scale a Persian miniature mountain, add bricks to Bruegel’s tower, perch upside down with Klee’s yellow birds, march past pink castles in Sassetta’s procession, ride on Ryder’s murky racetrack. I’m not ashamed that these are my worlds—they aren’t old at all. The living ferns I find stain skeletal fractal forms on old maps. Gears, mushrooms, coronae and cells mesh, echo, power machines or hover weightless. We travel down aimless roads and cross bridges to somewhere. We bury the past in layers of earth. As we will be buried, flooded, dismembered, forgotten, misremembered. These missing pages might remind us, help us make new histories, give us somewhere beautiful to get lost. 
Josh Dorman, 2012

Dorman begins with old maps; he ends with new worlds. The magic of the transmutation is nine-tenths craft and nine-tenths what Keats’s termed a negative capability: an artist’s ability to be in the midst of uncertainty and mystery without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I want to speak to both assets possessed by Dorman, since each is exceedingly rare and neither alone a sufficient cause of artistic greatness. Dorman can draw and paint with exquisite dexterity. The elements are executed with stunning precision and composed in such a way that an infinite number of groupings – visual plots and subplots – suggest themselves while relaxing, at last, into a satisfying consummation. However fanciful the landscape, the images are fastidiously rendered, and thus one can always orient oneself to the whole by taking one’s bearing from the beautiful at hand. Though we seldom recognize where we are geographically, we know the composition knows where it is aesthetically; and in that felt faith in the arrestingly realized we are set free to try on new kinds of locations.
Michael Verde, 2010

The map pieces are tantalizing, elusive works. They are difficult to describe, almost impossible to pin down in words, and yet they hold our attention in the same way that stories do. So much is going on in them that we feel compelled to look for a narrative, as if by “reading” the images before us we could finally grasp them in all their complexity. But the story I will read in one of these pictures is not the same story you will read. More than anything else, that singularity of response attests to the charm and power of these works. On the one hand, they are exuberant, almost child-like in their energy. On the other hand, the dominant feeling they provoke in us is one of reflection, of meditation. There is no solution to the mystery. As Dorman put it in a recent letter to me: “Ultimately, I paint to find out why I have to paint…in order to see things that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t make them. But I feel satisfaction only when I am genuinely surprised by what happens. As Braque once said: ‘There is only one thing in art of any value-that which cannot be explained.’”
Paul Auster, Cue Foundation Exhibition, 2004

The deeper you venture into Dorman’s vision the deeper underwater you go: your senses shorted, your logic cut loose. The apprehensive apparatus you’ve learned to trust lose their use. Your body that receives, your organs that sort and substantiate experience – these are revealed as the blunt, bent instruments they are: approximate and, in important ways, arbitrary. Why sight like ours, in this range, according to these dictates of line and form? Why this angle of access from vision into mood? From symbol into signification? Why this object and not that? In his layerings, Dorman creates a universe of objects that are, as in our universe, coexistent but never apprehensible in toto. He uses a visual language which he goes on to render nonsensical.

Josh Dorman was born in 1966, Baltimore. Lives and works in New York City. Dorman creates extraordinary visions from corruptions of nineteenth century maps and book engravings. The interplay between the collaged images, which lie upon delicate painted areas, in turn embedded into the surface of old maps form complete compositions of continuous fascination. The skill and success of Dorman's work is encased in the multi-layers and traces which effortlessly form both new topographic surfaces, and personal landscapes, illustrating a new, beguiling world.

John Martin Gallery
38 Albemarle Street, 
London W1S 4JG, United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0)20 7499 1314
Fax +44 (0)20 7493 2842
info@jmlondon.com
www.jmlondon.com

Opening Hours
From Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm or by appointment
Please note: the gallery is closed on Bank Holiday weekends