Within the artistic universe of Martin Salazar, great myths (the Minotaur, Genesis), real life scenes (mingong in front of the TV on the roadside) and fantastical visions (a carnal encounter between the Lady of Guo and Lisa Gherardini, supposedly the Mona Lisa) intertwine with no obvious or literal reason. On the contrary the artist takes pleasure in conserving their mystery while at the same time tainting them with irony.

His artistic and conceptual references are the result of having 3 countries, natal and adopted: China, France and Peru. These references, once in his hands, meet and melt together beyond territorial borders.

For Pascal Torres, Curator at the Louvre Museum, essayist and novelist, « the revival of myths mounts to nothing, they have to be appropriated, abducted, and recreated. (...) Martin Salazar’s art is the shifting image of eternity. »*

In the context of the Festival Croisements 2010, and for his first solo exhibition at the gallery Xin Dong Cheng, Martin Salazar is showing 6 recent and first time seen "oeuvres-installations."

They are big works of art, made in camphor wood (except “Jingshun Rd 22:30” which was created using the wooden beams of old Beijing houses that were little worked upon in order to respect the historical dimension of the material) and sometimes they combine several techniques : drawings, video and sound are added to the sculpted, coloured pieces.

Martin Salazar (born in 1964) studied Fine Arts at the Faculty of Art at the PUCP, Lima (Peru), before going on to teach drawing and sculpture there. He went to Beijing in 1993, where he received his masters in sculpture and the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des
Arts in 1998-99 and thereafter he settled in Paris. Since 2005, he has been sharing his time between his studios in Paris and in Beijing.

* Exhibition catalogue Beijing: Xin Dong Cheng Publishing House, 2010. Bilingual Edition French-Chinese, 136 p.