In his book ‘Agonie des Eros’ the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han discusses the lack of respect in today’s society, in which erotic experiences are becoming increasingly impossible. The idea of the radical other is vanishing, and is being replaced by the hell of sameness, pornography, and the idea that love is all about consumption.
‘Surely there will not be a policy of love. However, political actions communicate with Eros, represent a common desire for another way of life. Love breaks the perspective of the one and raises the world from the point of view of the other, of difference. Thus, Eros is a source of energy for political protest. It manifests as revolutionary aspiration to a completely different society. Moreover, still stands loyalty to what is to come.’
Under the concept of Paradise, an allegorical figure of a lost origin and promised destination, Martin Soto Climent represents as an existential conflict the situation exposed by Han. The artist proposes a way to liberate the identity of intimacy identity, consumed in our days under the rule of an overwhelming system.
Soto Climent’s discourse is almost tactile, exists in the form, appealing for the seduction of the senses, searching for a genuine impulse that involves and excites all aspects of being beyond the mere rational understanding so common in contemporary art aesthetics.
Paradise is Martin Soto Climent’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo appearance in Germany. The exhibition will feature a new series of artworks created with the left overs of luxury products, portraying the behaviour of mediated individuals as an insensitive being alienated by the culture of perpetual desire, but unable to get satisfaction. This is the logical consequence of a cultural tradition originated by the rupture between man and his natural environment: -we become a being that exists forcing every single thing to be part of our concept of property, a being expelled from ourself, from our present, from our own paradise-.
Martin Soto Climent works in a variety of media including sculpture, installation, photography and collage, and often manipulates existing, mundane objects. His approach of drawing out the sexual or otherwise implicit qualities of images and objects using the most minimal means, corresponds on a formal scale with the fact that most often the objects Soto Climent manipulates can be returned to their original state and therefore stay in an ephemeral stage of transition.
