Our love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours

2003 - Installation (Installation)

Martin Boyce

year born: 1967

gender: male

nationality: British

In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space. The trees, unique sources of light in the exhibition space, produce their own environment. These sculptures, as if extracted from a set, are enough to suggest an atmosphere, a landscape, or a movie. Their nocturnal depiction is ambivalent, hovering between poetic beauty and the potential threat of a park at night. Romantic views of nature blend with modern ideas of optimism and equality. However, from it emerges from a deep anxiety or paranoia. The perceived space cannot be localized inside a certain reality, rather it pertains to the everyone’s imagination. Therefore, in the installation, the viewer produces what he sees around him with his own eyes and own journey through the space. Its space becomes the psychological and emotional space of an idler. When describing the piece, Boyce has stated that the sculptures move far from the visible and the material generating more of an emotional state rather than theoretical reflection. “My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in “Electric trees and telephone booth” (2006) and formal traces in works such as “We are still and reflective” (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real.

“My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in Electric trees and telephone booth (2006) and formal traces in works such as We are still and reflective (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real. Martin Boyce was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1967 where he lives and works today.