Throughout Helen Marten's installation there exists a return to materiality and form. Peanuts (2012) aims to highlight basic composition; reducing objects to simplified form and colour. Desks, canned olives, loaves of bread, Charlie Brown cartoons, cheap pizza flyers – all methodically placed around the Chisenhale Gallery space in London. Marten harmonises these reduced elements to create a skeuomorphic representation of everyday objects, branding and iconography . Her twisted ‘still life’ exists in complete fabrication and relies heavily on individual perception. In the current world of retinal impatience, simulacra are everything . The 21st century high speed consumption of images, as a result of technological advance, has made for a paranoiac, schizoid mode of perception. Peanuts (2012) simulates the fragmented way …show more content…
Helen Marten utilises much the same techniques as Cezanne, aiming to reveal the complexity of digital perception. With the loss of physicality and surface friction in digital media the mind is left confused. In order to navigate out of this confusion, we count on memory and experience. In both the work of Cezanne and Marten it is evident that shifted representation of the everyday re-contextualises the appearance of these objects completely. Cezanne acts as a forefather in the manipulation of optics and perception, it is evident in Marten’s Peanuts (2012) that she works similarly within a contemporary