Jason Martin

Jason Martin presents a new body of paintings for his first exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York. The works on display continue Martin’s investigation of the fundamentals of painting, his experimentation beyond its traditional boundaries into three-dimensional space and his recent re-engagement with oil paint.

To produce these works, Martin begins with minimal means – no more than three colors, often similar in tonality, as well as just a handful of tools or brushes and a number of vertically aligned, aluminum panels. Despite these self-imposed limitations, Martin’s latest series veer from epic and luscious compositions of swirling dark oils to pared-down and muted abstractions in smoky off-whites. Formed of horizontal bands being swept to and fro across the surface, the paintings are loaded with varying quantities of paint, resulting perhaps in significant spillages, impasto ridges and arabesque whorls or else in smaller, incidental edges, ripples and smears. These parallel strata are built up from repeated, physical gestures – a process that Martin has honed since his days at Goldsmiths College in London in the early 1990s – although are created here, not by mechanical comb-like tools, but through precise and controlled gestures, albeit with the intervention of chance, moments of happenstance and the occasional swirl of chaos.