Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Jason Martin just reminded us that painting, far from being dead under the blows of digital and installation art, retains a sculptural vitality that grasps us by the guts. Born in 1970 on the island of Jersey, this British painter has spent more than three decades proving to us that monochrome abstraction can still take our breath away. His canvases are not simple formalist exercises; they constitute real physical experiences that question our relationship to space, time, and pictorial matter itself.
Trained at Chelsea College of Art then at Goldsmiths College in London in the 1990s, Martin quickly distinguished himself from his contemporaries among the Young British Artists by choosing the path of gestural abstraction rather than that of media scandal. Where Damien Hirst placed sharks in formaldehyde and where Tracey Emin exhibited her unmade bed, Martin opted for a more discreet but no less radical approach: exploring the physical limits of painting until transforming it into sculptural relief.
His early works, made in the 1990s, already reveal an obsession with the materiality of pigment. Applying oil or acrylic on aluminum, stainless steel, or Plexiglas surfaces, Martin uses tools resembling combs to create striations that ripple and pulse on the surface of his compositions. These repetitive gestures, sweeping across his panels in a single fluid movement, transform painting into a relief where each layer of material tells the story of its own creation.
The evolution of his practice bears witness to constant research. After a three-year break in using oil paint, Martin returned to this medium with a renewed, more minimal approach. His works from recent years, such as those exhibited in 2017 at the Lisson Gallery, reveal a formal simplification: bright colors give way to nuanced grays, powdery whites, and deep blacks. This evolution toward a reduced palette does not impoverish his work; it focuses and intensifies it.
The architecture of color
Jason Martin’s work maintains a silent but persistent dialogue with architecture. His paintings are not simple objects to hang on walls; they modify the space around them, creating tension between the traditional two-dimensionality of painting and the three-dimensionality of sculpture. This formal ambiguity evokes the concerns of minimalist architects who, since the 1980s, have sought to reveal the essence of space by reducing decorative elements and emphasizing pure materiality.
In minimalist architecture, as in Martin’s canvases, every element must justify its presence. Architects like Tadao Ando or Peter Zumthor build with concrete, light, and shadow meditative spaces that prioritize sensory experience over ornamentation [1]. Similarly, Martin constructs his compositions with color, texture, and gesture, creating pictorial spaces that invite contemplation. His striated surfaces evoke raw concrete walls where the imprint of the formwork reveals the construction process, transforming the technical necessity into an aesthetic quality.
Martin’s architectural approach also manifests in his relationship to scale. His large canvases function as colorful partitions that define and qualify the exhibition space. When light grazes their reliefs, it reveals the complex topography of their surface, creating plays of shadows and reflections that vary according to the spectator’s position. This interaction between the artwork and its luminous environment recalls how minimalist architecture uses natural light to reveal the beauty of raw materials.
The series of his cast metal works pushes this architectural logic even further. By transposing his pictorial gestures into materials such as copper, silver, and gold, Martin transforms painting into true wall architecture. These metallic reliefs, with their perfectly polished surfaces that reflect the environment, create a constant dialogue between the interior and exterior, between the artwork and the space that houses it. They function as fragments of architecture that have preserved the memory of the artistic gesture that generated them.
This architectural dimension of his work reaches its zenith in monumental works such as “Behemoth,” a black cork cube over two and a half meters high, exhibited at the Lisson Gallery in 2012. This sculpture, evoking as much the Kaaba in Mecca as a minimalist monument by Donald Judd, compels the spectator to negotiate its physical presence, to walk around it to try to grasp its essence. Like the best architectural achievements, it never fully reveals itself from a single viewpoint, keeping the spectator in a state of perpetual discovery.
Martin’s relationship to space is not limited to these formal considerations. His paintings generate what one might call a “mental space,” an architecture of contemplation that transcends the physical limits of the frame. The undulations of his monochrome surfaces create imaginary horizons, abstract landscapes that evoke both desert dunes and ocean waves. This ability to suggest immensity within the confines of a rectangular format aligns with the concerns of architects seeking to create infinite spaces within constrained volumes.
The cinema of matter
Jason Martin’s art also maintains deep connections with the abstract cinema of the 1920s, the revolutionary movement that sought to free the moving image from all narrative in order to retain only the pure visual sensation. Like the pioneers of absolute cinema, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger, Martin explores the rhythmic and musical possibilities of his medium, transforming the pictorial surface into a screen where sequences of gestures frozen in matter unfold.
The striations that run through his canvases evoke Richter’s experimental film strips in his “Rhythmus” (1921-1923), where simple geometric shapes danced across the screen according to visual rhythms [2]. For Martin, each pass of the tool creates a successive image, a frame of a film that would never be projected but would remain suspended in the eternity of painting. The movement of his arm crosses the canvas like the film strip crossing the projector, imprinting the trace of a time gone by in the colored material.
This film analogy takes on a particular dimension when considering the temporality of Martin’s creative process. His recent works in pure pigment require weeks of drying before he can apply the colored layers. This waiting time, this patience imposed by the material, evokes the long fixed shots of contemplative cinema, those moments where time seems suspended and the image acquires a particular density.
The influence of abstract cinema also manifests in the way Martin conceives of color. The first experimental filmmakers sought to create a “music for the eyes,” establishing correspondences between sound timbres and chromatic nuances. Martin, when moving from strict monochrome to the polychrome works of his recent period, orchestrates his colors according to a musical logic. The parallel bands of pink, yellow, and pistachio green in his 2020 canvases create visual harmonies that evoke the color ranges of Oskar Fischinger in his “Études” from the 1930s.
This cinematic approach to painting allows Martin to resolve one of the fundamental contradictions of contemporary art: how to create movement in a static medium. His undulating surfaces capture and alter light according to the viewing angle, creating an optical effect that transforms each viewer’s movement into a new cinematic shot. The work never reveals itself identical to itself; it lives, breathes, and pulses to the rhythm of our steps.
The cinematic dimension of his work finds its theoretical justification in this phrase from Leon Battista Alberti that Martin willingly cites: “Painting recreates the illusion of depth on the surface.” This illusion, in cinema, arises from the rapid succession of fixed images; for Martin, it arises from the layering of colored material that creates a real physical depth while suggesting imaginary spaces.
Martin’s latest works, conceived during the lockdown in his Portuguese studio, reveal an evolution towards what he himself calls a cinema of color. These small canvases where several hues mix and mutually contaminate function like storyboards of an abstract film. Each spatula pass corresponds to a shot; each color overlay, to a dissolve. Martin no longer paints objects or landscapes; he films the birth and death of colors, their perpetual metamorphosis on the sensitive surface of the canvas.
Heritage and innovation
Jason Martin’s positioning in contemporary art history reveals remarkable strategic intelligence. Rather than rejecting the heritage of modernism, he chooses to update it by drawing from the living sources of gestural abstraction while injecting a contemporary sensitivity. His personal pantheon, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock, and Yves Klein, testifies to this desire for synthesis between different approaches to abstract art.
From Pollock, Martin retains the choreographic dimension of creation, the idea that painting is dancing with the canvas. But whereas the American covered his large surfaces with gestural projections, the Englishman concentrates his energy in a few essential movements, transforming frenzy into meditation. From Fontana, he inherits this spatialist conception that makes the canvas a threshold between two worlds, a passage to the unknown. His thick reliefs create volumetric “tagli”, positive cuts that project the paint into real space. From Klein finally, he takes the lesson of the absolute monochrome, that ability to make a single color vibrate until it expresses infinity.
This synthesis is not at all outdated. Martin does not copy his masters; he metabolizes them to create a deeply personal pictorial language. His technical innovations, the use of metal supports, the texture tools he makes himself, the castings in precious metal, all bear witness to constant research. Each new series pushes further the exploration of the expressive possibilities of painting.
The “Sensation” exhibition of 1997 at the Royal Academy in London had established the Young British Artists, but Martin already held a singular position there. Unlike his contemporaries who favored provocation and spectacle, he relied on discreet seduction and pure emotion. This strategy, which might have seemed outdated during the “Cool Britannia” era, now proves prophetic. In a world saturated with aggressive images and violent stimulations, his paintings offer a space for breathing and contemplation that meets a deep need of our time.
Collectors and institutions do not make a mistake. Present in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Denver Art Museum, or the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, his works find their place in the temples of contemporary art. This institutional recognition validates an approach that favors formal research over conceptual ease.
Martin claims this tightrope walker position between tradition and innovation. His recent practice shows an artistic maturity that allows him to fully assume his aesthetic choices. When he describes his approach as an attempt to “fill the empty vase of minimalism,” he reveals his fine understanding of the stakes of contemporary art. Minimalism had emptied art of all subjective expressivity; Martin reinjects a sensual and emotional dimension without renouncing formal rigor.
The persistence of the visible
Today, while contemporary art seems obsessed with dematerialization and conceptualization, Jason Martin reminds us that painting retains unique powers. His canvases do not tell stories; they create experiences. They do not convey messages; they generate sensations. This economy of means, this direct efficiency of art on our senses, may be the most precious lesson of his work.
The recent evolution of his practice confirms this intuition. The polychrome works from his Portuguese period reveal a calm Martin, freed from the constraints of the art market and critical expectations. These small canvases where pinks, yellows, and greens blend reveal a painter who has found his path and explores it with a new freedom. Experimentation meets technical mastery, the apparent spontaneity masks a perfect control of effects.
This newfound freedom allows Martin to fully embrace the latent figurative dimension of his art. When he says he feels “like a landscaper disguised as an abstractionist,” he reveals the true nature of his artistic project. His paintings do not depict landscapes; they create them. They do not copy nature; they rival it in beauty and complexity.
The reliefs of his latest works indeed evoke geological formations, mysterious erosions, colorful sedimentations that tell the history of the Earth. But this evocation remains abstract enough to let each viewer freely project their own associations. This is where Martin’s strength lies: creating images that speak to our visual unconscious without ever confining it to a single meaning.
This ability to elicit pure emotion through the mere manipulation of colored material places Martin in the line of great colorists in art history. Like Turner with his sunsets or Rothko with his color fields, he reaches that mysterious zone where technique is forgotten to leave only raw emotion. His paintings function as triggers of affects, machines to generate beauty.
In an interview, Martin mentions the image of an astronaut who hides the Earth behind his thumb and declares: “Everything I know is behind my finger. Everything else is unknown to me.” This metaphor perfectly sums up his relationship with painting. Each of his canvases constitutes this thumb raised before the immensity of the visible, this futile and necessary attempt to circumscribe infinity within the limits of a colored rectangle.
Jason Martin’s art teaches us that painting, far from being an outdated medium, retains a unique ability to move and surprise us. At a time when everything seems to have been said and shown, his colorful reliefs prove that there are still territories to explore, sensations to discover, beauties to invent. For this alone, his work deserves our attention and our gratitude.
- Bullivant, Lucy. New Directions in Architecture: Contemporary Practices in Spatial Design. London: Wiley, 2019.
- Lawder, Standish D. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press, 1975.
