The aspect of passing away is certainly the element that first emerges when observing the somewhat diaphanous images of the young Belgian photographer and camerawoman Rhomi Martens, born in 1998. It certainly concerns the very essence of becoming; it acts like a drill which metaphorically sinks its point to the core and dissects that liminal and constantly changing point, which is undoubtedly made up by transformation. 

Etymologically, the word diaphanous means “to shine through” and this is how the artist’s images act, making mutation shine through, and temporality crystallise at the same time. Martens’ photographs do not yearn to become something else, they do not aspire to transform themselves into something evanescent that disregards the fundamental concepts of photography, but capture the snapshot, the becoming of light and shapes, of colours, and thus, of life. 

All the objects found in Rhomi Martens’ works, animate and inanimate alike, relate to the everyday life and yet lose their “momentary” character and are unravelled both spatially and temporally on a broader, evolving spectrum that constantly refers to existence. What is at stake is not a Heraclitean flow, but the vacillation of the elements as they stand in the world through balanced, elegant, and conscious excursions into the present time. The artist’s practice, through the image in motion, reiterates this kind of initiatory approach through the various repetitions of the same moment, in such a way it acquires the nature of eternity. 

Remaining still while moving, moving while remaining still: this twofold dialectic elegantly runs through and characterises Rhomi Martens’ entire oeuvre, relying on the wonder of everyday life and the shining and tumultuous development of all the elements that make it up.

– Domenico de Chirico

Milan, August 2021