Revive

For Revive, Martin Whatson worked with objects that already carried a history. Furniture and vintage photographs sourced from flea markets and auctions became the grounds for stencil, graffiti and colour, creating a conversation between an existing image and the artist’s intervention.

Curated by Rom Levy and supported by LeBasse Projects, the RexRomae presentation took place in Santa Monica in September 2017. Black-and-white photographic portraits were interrupted by painted masks and gestures; familiar materials were reworked so that their earlier identities remained visible beneath the new marks.

The exhibition developed Whatson’s longstanding contrast between greyscale restraint and bursts of colour. Here, the tension extended beyond the image into the object itself, asking how value, memory and meaning change when something discarded is returned to view.

The found materials gave the presentation a different rhythm from a conventional show of new canvases. Each work held two moments together: the life of the original object and the act through which Whatson made it part of his own practice.