A flow of gestural possibility that furthers pre-conceived and more familiar explorations in painterly gesture that in particular leave testimony or the extended reach of the body. Beginning with cubism the arm led gesture signalled movement from the elbow. From here albeit roughly forty years later, arm led gestural abstraction transformed the story of the self-referential brush mark.

Post war American painting and the Mono-ha movement of South Korea and Japan each brought their own versions of later high Modernism. From the wrist to the elbow to the shoulder the investment of the body and the meta traces recorded through space and time have left this passage of paintings history almost empty.

This distilled vision has roots in the early modernist enquiry in how painting’s subject and narrative has been replaced by not WHAT to paint but HOW to paint. Breaking away from perspectival illusory space as would a topographical painter if depicting views of nature, I have continued to challenge where an imaginary space couples with an unmediated sensory stimulation.

I have always sought inventive ways to adapt and appropriate a singular gestural language that at times has been described as a mono language. New ways of looking, new ways to perceive space.

At the time I stopped using fibrous brushes my ambition had been to refrain from less playful and whimsical rhythms for a greater and more rigorous exploratory practice.

Painting has its surprises and if successful awakens mysterious new thresholds.”

Works by Jason Martin are represented in many important private and public collections, including in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA, the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, the Schaufler Collection in Sindelfingen, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna.

Feel free to contact the gallery for any further information about the artist or images of the works.