Allegro Print, Singapore, 2019.
“I think the unconscious is what drives meaning…it creates possibilities of image making. I give myself over to that, I make myself a passive-receptacle or a vessel or a tool.” – Jason Martin
STPI presents “Meta physical”, an exhibition that chronicles the modes in which the dialectic relationship between matter and creative intuition is processed through the artist’s personal language of abstraction.
Through a rigorous experimentation in print and paper, Martin’s practice of abstract painting is reinvigorated by the processual nature of printmaking and the introduction of new material qualities.
In particular, the possibilities of embossed relief and paper casting have brought to Martin’s paintings a distinctive vocabulary of expression through a sustained exploration of line and gesture. The artist’s marks take on sweeping, continuous linearities in his drypoint compositions, while works of aquatint record drip-like traces. In his series of paper pulp paintings, textured images further occupy the space between the pictoriality of painting and the spatiality of sculpture.
Positioning himself at one with a set of conditions and moments afforded by the residency, Martin tempers chance and intention to generate varying expressions of surface texture on which the bodily is inferred, and the unconscious made perceptible.
Text by Mark Gisbourne.
