Scene XX: Graham Silveria Martin, A Degree of Focus

Matt Carey-Williams is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Graham Silveria Martin. About Drawing on film stills, print media and archival imagery, Silveria Martin’s work explores desire, intimacy and the transmission of queer histories across time. A key source for the exhibition is Blueboy , the influential 1970s gay men’s magazine whose imagery of liberation, aspiration and community provides a lens through which the artist examines representations of the male body. In dialogue with this material, Silveria Martin also engages with the legacies of nineteenth-century British artists, reworking classical poses and idealised forms to foreground vulnerability, sensuality and emotional complexity. Across a new body of paintings and works on paper, images emerge through layered surfaces of primer, stained grounds and carefully calibrated brushwork. Figures appear and recede within compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, visibility and concealment. Attentive to the material qualities of painting, Silveria Martin treats the canvas as a site where memory, desire and historical reference accumulate over time. The resulting works foreground the act of looking, as figurative forms emerge, dissolve and linger across the picture plane, occupying a space that is at once personal and collective. Read more Toggle Painting