Interview: Martin Sigwald
Luca Curci talks with Martin Sigwald, one of the winners of ARTIST OF THE MONTH – DECEMBER 2020.

SiG’s work is extensive, experimental, and packed with symbolism. It is inhabited by the most varied images of different times or artistic periods, these references are mixed with an iconography, which is in principle alien, to build an absolutely original and different discourse; the works provoke a new reading in a paradigmatic framework; they acquire a meaning open to reflection in the viewer. The use of various techniques and / or media: acrylic, collage, gold leaf, direct printing, corporeity, sculpture, as appropriate to raise and make credible that question and characteristic of SiG’s work: What do we choose to see when we look? The feeling that everything is fake, except the emotion, thus resignifying the images of famous paintings, the invented bills, the use of everything already written to say in another language the true truth of art: magic. Dichotomies often pre-existing create an amalgam of brushstrokes, prints, collages, sprays, lights and objects forming the corpus of a new artistic language, which plays with contemplation and the expectation of a revealing and sometimes disturbing meaning. His Series Islam Smile 2016, Islam Smile / All You Need is Love 2018 and América Bang’s First! of 2019, are the result of an artistic and professional evolution that defines him as a unique, original artist, owner of his own iconography that contrasts the most classic spirit of art with the licentious aesthetic daring, developing in conceptual freedom multiple and infinite languages ​​of absolute beauty.

Luca Curci – What is the art for you?
Martin Sigwald – In addition to my way of life, art is what rescues us from monotony, the oxygen that our existence needs and feeds our fantasy, where everything is possible and infinite.

LC – What are you currently working on?
MS – I am immersed in my new series The order of factors, which I develop in a pictorial and digital way, bringing to the artistic field what in mathematics is called the commutative property (The order of factors does not alter the product), using parts of works by the great masters of art to create new forms and figures that are especially attractive when composing new pieces with a unique atmosphere that allow different readings and interpretations.

LC – What’s your past?
MS – Art has always been a part of my life. I trained as a graphic designer, photographer and in Fine Arts. For more than 30 years I worked in advertising contributing this knowledge and trying to give a more artistic vision to that world.

LC – What is your thinking?
MS – The difference between what we look at and what we finally see in our mind is something that has always fascinated me. A painting is the result of thousands of brushstrokes that make up the whole, but each of them must be in tune with the others to offer us this revelation, I try to ensure that this magic is always present in my works.

LC – What is the experience that has most influenced your work?
MS – Years of experience in advertising and photography have been very important in developing the germs of each Series in which I work.

LC – How is your creative process?
MS – Reality offers triggers that make me want to narrate or make visible a theme or the story behind a character, from that I evaluate the development possibilities offered by the different techniques and I choose the one that seems to me to give more meaning and expansion, from there I work and work.

LC – Has your style changed over the years?
MS – At first the issue of having my own style mortified me, I wanted to have a way of making it recognizable. Through the years and work I have achieved an artistic personality that I prefer to a style, I think style is like fashion and as Yves Saint Laurent said “fashion is something so ugly that you have to change it every few months”

LC – How?
MS – The revolution that technology has brought about has undoubtedly influenced my work the most. Since I sat in front of the first Mac the possibilities have been endless.

LC – What role does the artist play in society? And contemporary art?
MS – Practically all my works are related to the different moments in which they were made. Sometimes I think I do artjournalism or something like that, but I think that in addition to the aesthetic theme and intellectual discourses, artists must send a message through our work and leave testimony of the moment in which we live. In my last series the topics have been tolerance in Islam Smile, power and its representatives in America Bang’s First !, and this last year, of course, the pandemic in the Cov19 series.
The role of contemporary art is to tear down walls, create bridges, conceptualize and discover new imaginary horizons, strive and try to overcome as much as possible to make a better world and make it difficult for those who come behind.