For over 25 years, Martin has been
primarily interested in exploring the materiality of paint and the physical
action of painting, and sees his painting “as a choreography or series of
movements that can never been danced again quite the same way.”
Although his works are abstract, they can
also be described as painted landscapes, as they take viewers on a journey of
the artist’s continuous movements frozen in time and space.
Martin says he’s interested in
furthering the possibilities within the tradition of abstraction finding “new
approaches emptying out more familiar notions of how to paint and developing a
reduced and essential personalised language.”
His style has evolved over the years, but
he’s primarily known for large monochromatic artworks laden with oil or acrylic
gel that have been richly textured with the help of comb-like brushes or
cardboard pieces that he uses to move the paint.
Sensation at the Royal Academy in
London in 1997. It marked the birth of the term Young British
Artists and YBA has since become a trademark of innovative British
art. “He has an extraordinary feeling of materiality, structure and
monochromatic colour which is deeply anchored in the modernist tradition
of painting with its appreciation of processual, performative and gestural
aspects," remarks Thaddaeus Ropac of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
Martin’s dynamic movements—at times slow
and sweeping, at others swift with abrupt halts—are the main subject of his
works and he describes the composition as “uninterrupted in a series of movements,
and understanding that choreography is unlocking the painting.”
“I believe the most interesting
abstraction has a source of figuration and my approach is that there is a
warmth in figuration that I try to bring to the movement,” Martin says.
Trained as a painter at the Chelsea
College of Art and Goldsmiths College, Martin says he was influenced early on
by a work of the American abstract painter Robert Ryman, a series of white
stripes painted with a very large brush that he saw at the Tate Gallery. “This
work showed a combination of brush marks with the suggestion that they were
seamless, that there was an uninterrupted movement, a single sweep. I started
to wonder how I could elaborate on that and take it further, creating a single
brush mark,” he recalls.
Martin started using large brushes, adapting
them to his own needs, bending them, breaking them up and reassembling them
using a variety of materials, “basically whatever I found in the studio that
would deliver some new extension to my movement,” he says.
Martin points out that with his
technique, one needs to work rapidly as oil will harden after a period in which
case “you can’t move around at the speed or the pace (where) you are going to
get the result you want.” Because his work is very physical he also needs a
surface that is “strong enough to punish without worrying about damaging the
canvas,” so he uses aluminium, stainless steel or Perspex as a support. “I wouldn’t
be able to achieve the same effect if I was using canvas. You have to have a
stronger support for me to be able to do this.”
Martin has always been interested in
pushing the limits of his materials and over the years, his techniques have
evolved.
Having first work with oil on a wall, started
working on his studio floor, layering buckets of acrylic paste on his support
and then moulding the thick surface with his hands or tools, in effect
‘sculpting’ his paintings and transforming the paste into performative volume.
Martin continued his exploration of 2-D perspectives
and started to solidify his thick impasto marks in a series of small casts
(nickel, copper, bronze) in the manner of traditional 3-D bronze sculptures or
statues. The cast creates the impression “that the material has come together
almost in an uninterrupted time and movement, but the quality of how that flat
ground meets the edge is what creates that illusion,” he remarks, adding that
the small formats pose no less challenging demands than works on a large scale
as they are more intensive and critically precise to create.
After a self-imposed three-year hiatus
with oil painting, during which he focussed on mixed media, Martin has returned
to oil using a more minimalist gesture, aiming to reduce brush strokes to a
minimum. Instead of using large brush he started using hand-held brushes again,
helping him reconnect to the raw aspect of painting.
In November 2018, Martin
will present the result of a recent residency at the STPI – Creative
Workshop & Gallery where he developed a series of works using paper casts,
pulp and dry point. “The experimental nature of the workshop afforded me a
freedom to explore materials in exciting new ways. The exhibition will
hopefully reveal surprises in how materials can be transformative,” he says
adding, “The works as a whole endeavour to hold some mysteries questioning the
nature of their materials and how they have come into being.”
“If my overall studio practice can be
understood as developing a pictorial language, my collaboration with STPI takes
me on an R&D tour of the grammar inherent to that language,” he says.
AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRESTIGE MAGAZINE (October 2018)
AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRESTIGE MAGAZINE (October 2018)