The thick scent of oil paint hits you straight away as you enter Jason Martin’s show. The stuff is caked inches deep across the aluminium panels that Martin paints on, hanging from their edges. Seriously, these things will take years to fully dry.
For Martin, these pieces mark a return to the medium after a three-year hiatus. The first room features a number of large-scale works, all grey or white, the paint applied horizontally, either flatly with a trowel or in ridged striations with a brush. They might vaguely suggest landscapes but Martin isn’t that kind of abstract painter. His work is about the process of painting: nothing more, nothing less. Even their titles only refer to the paint used, like ‘Untitled (Davy’s Grey/Ivory)’. Essentially what you see is a trade-off between purpose and accident: the deliberate strokes he makes versus the drips and splatters they leave behind. As with lots of process-based art, whether it’s as interesting for the audience as it is for the artist is open to debate – but they just about stop short of looking overly contrived. Just about.
Way more interesting is the work in the final room. The best way I can think of to describe it is as what the T-1000 from ‘Terminator 2’ would look like in the middle of disguising itself as an artwork. Here, Martin casts his gloopy works in silver – transforming them from paintings into sculptures, adding a clever new layer to the process. Seeing your own reflection bend and morph across their gleaming metallic surfaces is just a little breathtaking.