ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Chris Martin
Working from a heterogeneous array of cultural traditions, Chris Martin makes paintings that serve as living documents of the eternal present. He privileges stylistic diversity and immediacy over predetermined aesthetic ideas, generating an art that can be as primal as it is knowing, as vibrantly joyful as it is meditative and hermetic. He has experimented with non-art materials, non-traditional installation, and extreme scale.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Recent Paintings” features new paintings made by Chris Martin in the Catskill Mountains, New York, where the artist has maintained a lifelong connection. The paintings exemplify Martin’s four-decade-long, freethinking approach to the medium. Abstraction, landscape, and collage coexist on equal, if repeatedly negotiated terms, so that taking in the show as a whole renders moot such categorical distinctions. Instead, Martin provides evidence for the overlapping and mutual influence of numerous artistic lineages. On several occasions, gestural and geometric brands of abstraction inhabit the same composition, though in other cases, one or the other of these modes dominates as Martin makes full use of its visual moods and textural possibilities. For instance, the bands of color intersected by zigzagging or diamond forms that have shown up in Martin’s work in different guises over the years, and that nod toward hard-edged aesthetics while maintaining a notably soft and surreal pictorial weight, appear here with a particularly crystalline clarity. Long associated with the community of artists in Brooklyn who have staked out idiosyncratic and innovative directions, Martin also maintains a lifelong connection to the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where the paintings for this exhibition were made. While over the course of his career he has made paintings of all sizes—including monumental ones that challenge the idea of scale altogether—here Martin focuses on what for him are medium-sized canvases. Abstraction, landscape, and collage coexist on equal, if repeatedly negotiated terms, so that taking in the show as a whole renders moot such categorical distinctions. Instead, Martin provides evidence for the overlapping and mutual influence of numerous artistic lineages. On several occasions, gestural and geometric brands of abstraction inhabit the same composition, though in other cases, one or the other of these modes dominates as Martin makes full use of its visual moods and textural possibilities. For instance, the bands of color intersected by zigzagging or diamond forms that have shown up in Martin’s work in different guises over the years, and that nod toward hard-edged aesthetics while maintaining a notably soft and surreal pictorial weight, appear here with a particularly crystalline clarity. Their uneasy relationship to the grid evokes the sensation of being in a familiar place but in unexpected weather. Other paintings, which exude a more improvisational energy, also feature linear frameworks, though these are jigsaw-like and divide up the areas of color beneath into angular, unclassifiable shapes. Martin’s use of glitter and other media adds a further layer of complexity, as chromatic shifts are accompanied by changes in reflectivity, opacity, and depth. It would be a mistake, however, to assess Martin’s work based on formal terms alone. While some pictures in this exhibition include appropriated images of recognizable Martin forms like the planet Saturn, cannabis leaves, and mushrooms, even the works that remain entirely non-objective are full of palpable moods and a sense of place. Some communicate wintry austerity and the sense of spaciousness and wonder that accompany it; others pulsate with an awareness of the life cycle, as well as the human responses of pathos and humor that tend to crop up as one season gives way to the next.
Photo: Chris Martin, Midnight, 2021, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 87 x 75 x 3 inches (221 x 190.5 x 7.6 cm), © Chris Martin, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewoord Pl., Los Angeles, CA , USA, Duration: 27/5-5/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/
