Tang Contemporary Art is delighted to present ‘Eclipse’ by British artist Jason Martin (b.1970 Jersey, Channel Islands, UK), his first exhibition at the gallery in Hong Kong and his third solo show in China.
Jason Martin is a painter whose methods address the materiality and possibility of structuring paint, questioning the very potentiality of painting. His inventiveness and creative capacity continually surprise with processes that constitute both his paintings and sculptures, featuring a wide range of approaches.
Painting for Martin is performative as both act and stage.
A life within is expected by the very execution of each canvas.
In the artist’s words, “Painting is a lust for the temperance of guile, grace and gravity.”
Nature and the environment remain a constant guide to the ambitions of Martin’s studio practice. Living in Portugal surrounded by a cork forest, the brutal force of nature is a direct means of inspiration as evident with the diptych In Plain Sight (2023, 120 x 240 cm). This cast wall relief began as a collage of virgin cork bark, transformed and rendered into a polyurethane version then painted with gold particle.
Likewise, the Torso works translate from the same material into silver and bronze. The abundant surroundings of Martin’s studio in Portugal are rich in natural resources. As a site-specific tour de force, the multi-panel Vital signs in 5 parts takes the viewer even closer to his threshold of desire. Without depiction, we confront an aerial landscape majestic and reductive in equal measure.
“As the passage of time is revealed through a narrative of line, the ambition of this work is to recall nature and landscape, light and space and the celestial associations encountered when reflecting towards a cosmic naturalism.”
Martin’s paintings are as reliant on structure, method and execution as they are of chance and serendipity. The intense and viscous traces revealed by large brushes, enliven the oil and allows the viewer to enter as a participant following a passage of time fleeting yet concrete. The experience is not static but interactive and immersive.
This transformative enquiry is invested with a passionate belief in the poetics of materials and their surroundings. These paintings reflect moments that combine the calm and meditative with the haptic chaotic and unpredictable.
EXHIBITING WORKS
ARTIST
JASON MARTIN
b. 1970, Jersey, Channel Isands, UK
Lives and works in London, UK and Melides, Portugal
Jason Martin studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a participant in the legendary 1997 exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” at the Royal Academy in London and the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
Known for his thickly textured, monochromatic paintings which achieve uniquely sculptural surfaces, Martin layers oil paint or acrylic gel atop a metal or Plexiglas substrate, and then drags a comb-like tool through the substance to create voluminous striations. The process-based formalism of his practice shows the influence of artists such as David Budd and Robert Ryman. “The most interesting abstraction has a source of figuration,” he reflected. “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].”
Jason Martin’s work is held in international private and public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, and more.