There is another world but it is in this one.
— Paul Éluard
Fergus Martin’s work inhabits the shifting threshold between order and reverie, structure and dream. A painter, sculptor, and photographer with a post-minimalist sensibility, Martin pursues forms that are at once grounded in material presence and yet open to other worlds; metaphoric, poetic, and psychological. His practice demonstrates how a simple form — a barrel, a pipe, a bale of hay — can hold within it constellations of meaning, drawing us into spaces where reality folds into imagination, suggesting a kind of Neverland: a suspended time and place where the weight of daily concerns momentarily falls away.
In Garden Light, the disciplined geometry of formal gardens becomes mutable, animated by shifting colours and light. The garden is revealed not as a symbol of human mastery but as a temporal site of change and fragility. Hay Bales, meanwhile, reimagines the pastoral landscape through repetition and folklore. The endless proliferation of forms recalls both Donald Judd’s serial structures and Arte Povera’s embrace of humble, everyday matter, while also drawing on Irish myth and Yeats’ longing for escape into otherworldly freedom. The work unsettles the apparent stability of landscape, exposing its layers of memory, labour, and desire.
Other works extend this dialogue between material presence and imaginative projection. Barrel suggests both elemental transformation and celestial descent, poised between the industrial and the cosmic. Pipe Dreams invokes the pursuit of the unattainable, transforming plain structures into vessels of longing. In Storm, cycles of violence and calm echo both natural weather and mechanical process, highlighting the volatility embedded within ordinary objects.
Martin’s approach distinguishes itself from the austerity of Minimalism by allowing forms to retain ambiguity, narrative, and resonance. Where Judd or Andre emphasised literal presence, Martin’s works are thresholds; objects that carry within them the potential for story, reverie, and projection. His attention to gardens, bales, and storms also engages with a longer tradition of Irish art and literature where landscape is never neutral, but always a contested site of memory, myth, and belonging.
At the heart of Formal and Wild Landscapes lies this tension between the formal and the unruly. Martin shows us that even the most minimal of forms can open into vast imaginative fields, reminding us what Éluard wrote. His works invite us into that suspended realm — poised between material and metaphor, landscape and dream — a personal Neverland where time slows, and worries are held at bay.
Palazzo Birago, Turin
Dates: 25th October – 4th November 2025
Opening Reception: 25th October, 6pm
Location: Palazzo Birago di Borgaro – Camera di Commercio di Torino, Italy
Artist Fergus Martin is represented by Green on Red Gallery, Dublin https://www.greenonredgallery.com
Supported by
