When I Arrived, You’d Already Left: Rhett Martyn’s Exhibition at Nel
On May 1, Nel Gallery in Cape Town invites all fans of emotionally touching art to visit Rhett Martyn’s exhibition titled “When I arrived, you’d already left.” The upcoming show features a series of landscapes created in the artist’s signature style and technique of repeated dissolution and redrawing. A talented draughtsperson, painter, and designer, Martyn offers everyone the opportunity to explore the concepts of absence, constructed longing, and the aesthetics of the non-experienced in his works.
Meet Rhett Martyn
Rhett Martyn (b. 1971) is a South African interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and educator who currently lives and works in Johannesburg. His specialization is at the intersection of sculpture, drawing, and painting, with major themes spanning landscapes, identity, and socio-political issues. The artist focuses on the process of art creation with an in-depth interest in the subject matter’s transformation.
Martyn’s art often blends the motifs of Johannesburg’s history and modern urban themes and imagery. Some of his notable exhibitions include the 2018 solo show “1:10 Modernist Plunder: The New Constructivists” at David Krut Projects Johannesburg and the 2024 group show at Nel Gallery, which garnered much attention for the artist’s unique method of art creation.
Rhett Martyn’s Sublime Landscapes
The first impression that every viewer of Martyn’s landscapes gets is the intentional, inherent, sublime nature of his art. His works are filled with intricate detail, yet desolate – a unique output of the artist’s method of painting a landscape, its further erasure with solvents and erasers, and subsequent redrawing on top of the destroyed image. Martyn repeats these procedures multiple times until the effect of ghostly presence and the longing to capture the details never seen is fully achieved.
Leitmotifs of Rhett Martyn’s Exhibition at Nel Gallery
At the heart of Martyn’s upcoming exhibition at Nel Gallery is the in-depth motive to create an experience of constructed longing for the landscape one has never seen or attended. It represents the artist’s creative exploration of the divide between first-hand experience and representation, which is often blurred in the digital-savvy world. For Rhett Martyn, the sublime occupies a special place in life and creative activity, while for millions of people in the world, the sublime has become scrollable and commodified.
The leitmotif of “When I arrived, you’d already left” is a spiritual gaze at how people borrow others’ lives by consuming their content and forgoing their first-hand experiences in exchange for constructed and dislocated experiential snapshots. Works presented at the exhibition offer a deep dive into the intricacies of the human search for meaning and serve as artifacts of dislocation.
“When I arrived, you’d already left” by Rhett Martyn will be on view at Nel Gallery through May 25, 2025.