Spun Through the Heel

Kyle Alden Martens’ first solo exhibition with Patel Brown presents a boudoir of seductive forms and textures that rub up against one another in a gentle orgy of frottage. With a queer-tinted sense of artifice, Martens works intimately with leather, silk, wood, jewellery, and other materials. His work speaks to the perennial quest to “fit in” and the universal desire to find a place – metaphorical and literal – for oneself. But as much as we seek comfort and acceptance, we also have the libidinal urge to stand out or stand apart, to shock. For Martens, sometimes a chair is just a chair and sometimes it is a jewellery box – sometimes it is both or neither. Keys allow access to new spaces and, with them, new possibilities, while purses contain and protect what is inside, not unlike our own bodies. Here, in Spun Through the Heel, we see a suit embedded with rolled-up belts become a bedazzled headboard for a bed. As Martens mellifluously recounted the making of each work – a fabric pulled over a sculptural form; silk twisted into rope; slip-on shoes with marbles and glass watch-faces embedded in the walnut soles, I thought of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.” The princess proves her royal standing by feeling the presence of a single pea under twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds. It is an irritant that cannot be assuaged, keeping her up all night, but it confirms her authenticity for, “Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.” Martens’ manipulations of scale in his sculpture implicate our own bodily awareness and self-image: ring sizers slipped into ropes invite trying on: rings cannot be too small nor too large but rather must be just right. This nagging question of “fit” wittily animates the exhibition: tall and short, narrow and wide, high and low – what goes with what, what goes on top of what, what goes inside what. If the string of tiny gloves suggests a Franz Erhard Walther piece for dolls, the obscenely oversize gloves boast the erotic excess and femme-top glamour of thigh-high boots, except these would extend far beyond the shoulder and are cheekily split along the sides. The recurring motif of human hands in his oeuvre echoes Martens’ own intensive – yet somehow both gentle and sly – handiwork performed to bring his sculptures to life. While he always works with great precision and exacting care, here he experiments with looser gestures: stray threads, unfixed bows, perhaps even the tinkling of falling rings. Surrealism loves its fetish objects but this is far more friendly than the fetishist’s amour fou. I ask myself, what are the boundaries or rather the slippery overlaps among aesthetics, utility and play, and what does it mean to look – and not just touch – against the grain?