Jason Martin: Painting as Sculpture

This jewel-like series of eight panel reliefs hovers between dual registers: between painting and sculpture, between the singular and the serial, between movement and stasis and even between abstraction and figuration, as each viewer is mirrored in the smooth, unpainted sections of the supports. Bravura swirls and snaking rivulets of painterly gesture form endlessly perusable eddies of incident and yet the metallic sheen refutes and repels easy interpretation, making these simultaneously seductive and unyielding, adamantine objects.

Martin has further explored the boundary between painting and sculpture in a new floor-bound sculptural work, titled Anathema, which resembles a giant alien seedpod or a chromed meteorite crashed in the gallery courtyard. Also cast in electro-polished steel, this composite object is based on chunks of virgin cork bark found near his studio in Portugal. Its knotty, abstract exterior adding a further remove from the notion of handmade artistic expression normally ascribed to painting.