OPENING: APRIL 20, 2017
PERIODO: APRIL 21 - JULY 30, 2017
New Oils is the new ending point of the long and successful stylistic research of Jason Martin. Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea, in its ten-year long collaboration with the artist, presents for the first time in Italy a new series of paintings by one of the most interesting personalities of the Young British Artists group.
Martin continues to produce paintings on aluminum background, where the sign is still the subject of the work. However, compared to the previous works, we are in presence of a thoughtful evolution in which the structure of the work is consolidated in its traditional form in order to provide support to a constantly inquiring spirit and in continuous need of questioning itself and analyzing the infinite possibilities of painting.
Whether it is oil, resin or metal, Jason Martin establishes a direct dialogue with the essence of these materials, manipulating them in the same way as if they were an extension of his own body. In this new series of works, the saturated, thick and rich matter is gathered to separate a flat and smooth surface in unidirectional and parallel cuts.
Color agglomerates interrupt the signic linearity of the compositions, at times like protuberances which result from the same lines, other times as relapsed clusters fallen on the composition by gravity. We meet thus two dimensions that can be metaphorically translated in different reading plans of the work: one characterized by the stroke movement consciously led and the other by the uncontrolled randomness of color fall.
A slow evolution that involves almost exclusively the graphic sign, recovering, on the other hand, the media and the supports previously used: Jason Martin has experienced with oil since 2013, and then turned its attention, until now, to pigments, resins and more textured and three-dimensional media. The common denominator of these steps must be identified, as Francis Gooding says, in the subject matter, the instruments with which the artist continues to produce his own signs and the grammar of their relations.
The works are at the same time an example of an imprecise and instinctive painterly gesture and a decisive sculptural dynamic presence: we are still in presence of the vitality, energy and perpetual motion of what would be too simplistic to define as "landscape".
Right now, looking at a painting by Jason Martin is like being in front of the surface of a vinyl record: the furrows speak and tell of conflicting emotions, restlessness and serenity, exuberance and discretion. An open scene interweaving the exacerpts of life that our perceptions can read and on which we can self-referentially reflect, generating an implication both physical and sensorial.
