Onyis Martin: Talking Walls

OOA Gallery is proud to present Talking Walls, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Onyis Martins — curated by Sabo Kpade — at its gallery in Sitges, Barcelona from August 10th to September 8th, 2024. Onyis Martin is one of the foremost contemporary painters in East Africa. Born in 1987, Martin established his practice in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi with works that challenged and progressed conventions in painting, sculpture and conceptual art in the region. Martin’s iconographic grammar in Talking Walls — his debut solo exhibition in Spain — has been developed through intense research and experimentation, coupled with his lived experiences in Nairobi metropolis.

The Talking Walls paintings are predicated on two dramatic factors: one, as an aesthetic proposition, and two; as psychic-mapping of a metropolitan consciousness, in relation to image-making and the role of art in society. The Talking Walls paintings establishes Martin as a torchbearer of decollage, the torn-poster methods popularised in 1960s France by proponents of nouveau realisme. The exhibition introduces the notion of transdecollage, to suggest Martin, in his Talking Walls series, has positively retooled the art historical context of décollage and lettrism, from its mid 20th Central European origins to a postcolonial East African city in the early 21st century.

In Talking Walls, twelve paintings and nine works on paper will be displayed in our Barcelona gallery, along with a sound installation, created by the artist and recorded directly from locations around Nairobi. The combined works will transform the gallery space, thereby amplifying the visual and sensorial experience of the exhibition. More works will be made exclusively available on Artsy. The new paintings and works on paper in the exhibition display a variety of decollagist and mark-making techniques — different modes of paint pouring, inscriptions, number systems, reduced images, scratching and scouring surfaces, iconography and much besides — to make indistinct the boundaries between collage, painting and drawing.

The resulting works are imbued with Martin’s singular autographic gesture, which profitably deploy juxtapositions: formal and metaphorical, material and immaterial, the plastic and the discursive, as a method of inquiry into notions of consumerism, African spirituality and print capitalism. In doing so, Martin presents painting and décollage as discursive diagrams for social studies, and as a reckoning with the consciousness of a populace.

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