The exhibition by Joachim Schönfeldt came to an end last week, but the Cape Town-based Nel Gallery is already back with some more exciting news. A solo exhibition by Rhett Martyn, titled “When I arrived, you’d already left,” is opening at the gallery on May 1, 2025, at 5:30pm. Rhett Martyn is known for his distinctive drawing style and the unique effect of the constructed longing his sublime landscapes produce on the audience. Let’s take a closer look at the upcoming exhibition and the artist behind it.
Constructed Longing in Rhett Martyn’s Work
The title of the exhibition is illustrative of Rhett Martyn’s approach to landscape painting. The artist uses images of landscapes shared by hikers, which he redraws and then dissolves with the help of chemical solvents and erasers. After the image’s partial destruction, Martyn reconstructs its various parts and repeats the process of erasure and reconstruction multiple times.
“When I arrived, you’d already left,” though mostly containing hiking imagery, is not about hiking per se. As Martyn personally shared, he strove to create an impression of quiet melancholy about the present-day dislocation and consumerization of the sublime. His works represent the artist’s view of how people borrow the lives of others by active social media consumption in search of meaning. The repeatedly erased and reconstructed images of hiking landscapes thus serve to illustrate the trauma of a lack of experience and the elusive nature of longing for something the viewer has never seen.
The result of such meticulous, multi-stage work is always a unique, sublime effect of a desolate landscape on the verge of reality and a dream. According to the artist, this series of landscapes was created to demarcate the distance between personal experience and representation. Martyn intentionally takes other people’s photographs to show how absence and imaginary experience differ from a real one of presence. As a result of such a unique, creative reinterpretation of experiential presentation, the artist gives the audience a feeling of the constructed longing for the experience they never had.
About Rhett Martyn
Rhett Martyn was born in 1971. He works in multiple art fields as a multidisciplinary artist, combining the figurative traditions of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Besides painting, Martyn is an established designer; he also conducts active academic research and education work in Johannesburg. His art objects often contain a critical commentary on the present-day socio-political landscape of South Africa.