ART CITIES:Paris-Jason Martin

Many painters across history have focused their attention on the sculptural potential of painting, but that hasn’t stopped Jason Martin experimenting in the same field. Drawing on the heritage of abstract expressionism and minimalism, Martin’s work centers on the physical properties of oil paint, and the subtleties of the painter’s manipulation of his medium, his thickly textured paintings achieve uniquely sculptural surfaces.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

Jason Martin’s most recent pigment paintings are on presentation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris. By transmuting the core gestures of painting into three-dimensional, sculptural objects, Martin invites us to consider painting’s building blocks from a different perspective. His recent “Pigment Paintings” modelled by hand in complex layers of pasty materials, creating a dense weave of intermingling textures. Thick brush strokes punctuate flows and streams of solidified magma. The organic amalgamates with the inorganic and smooth surfaces acquire a more mineral texture. Pure pigments are projected onto these rugged landscapes, evoking telluric or volcanic sceneries. A lump of material, reminiscent of water lilies, protrudes from the background here and there, expressing the suggestive power of abstract painting to convene an image in the viewer’s mind. As the artist said in an interview “The most interesting abstraction has a source of figuration. “My approach is that there is a warmth of figuration that I try to affect into the movements, gestures that I make on the canvas”. Born in 1970 in Jersey, United Kingdom, Jason Martin studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths College in the early 1990s. Trained as a painter in oil and acrylic, Martin began manipulating his chosen material in the early 1990s, dragging, scraping, combing, raking and squeegeeing paint across the surfaces of his canvases and aluminium panels until their edges bled colour and the surfaces picked up textures, gestures and happenstance along the way. The artist gained the attention of a wider audience after his inclusion in the 1997 exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” held at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 22/6-28/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net