All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware
Martin Buber

Buchmann Galerie is delighted to present at the gallery the exhibition Pole Star by British painter Jason Martin (b. 1970 on the Channel Island of Jersey, UK).

A central focal point of the exhibition is an extensive series of new works on paper created by the artist with dyes. Unlike the color pigments used in oil or acrylic paints, these dyes react to moisture, light, and heat in complex ways. Accordingly, the painterly results generated via the artist’s process are at times unpredictable, allowing for a compelling interplay between control and chance.

The works on paper were realized during extended travels; they are painterly travelogues, created in the mangrove swamps of Bahia, Brazil, among other places. Since the dyes interact with the elements—scorching heat and tropical humidity—the works are responsive to all climatic variables. Thus, for the painter, nature functions as both sparring partner and collaborator.

Jason Martin describes these works as “records of a belated naturalism”—testaments to a “naturalism of afterwardsness,”(*) in which the imaginary and real intersect. Whereas historical naturalism strove for an accurate portrayal of nature’s forms, Jason Martin infiltrates nature with his material—through color and texture—using processes that inscribe themselves in the paper. The technique developed for these vibrantly colorful works on paper allows the artist to capture the contemporary sublime of an increasingly fragile nature. These lushly sensuous works are snapshots of an encounter with nature and demonstrate, without being didactic, the threat it faces.

On view in the exhibition are also large-format oil paintings, which form a dialogue with the works on paper. The richly colorful paintings consistently explore the possibilities and facets of abstract painting, poised on the threshold of the figurative and representational. The painting Pole Star, which serves as the show’s title, is dominated by a gestural trace of blue that oscillates between abstraction and representation, similar to the works on paper. Sumptuously applied paint tempts viewers to read the painting as a seascape or a rendering of a sky. However, this impression is immediately transformed into a display of lush, sensual colors. At the same time, the paintings, executed in oil on aluminum, are a meditation on corporeality. Here gestural actions are implemented in a quasi-educative manner, where the wide, directed sweep of the painter’s arm performatively demonstrates the possibilities of painting and the limits of the body.

Jason Martin took part at the age of twenty-seven in the legendary exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, presented at the Royal Academy in London and the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 1997. Buchmann Galerie presented the artist’s first solo exhibition at a gallery in Germany in 2018. This is the painter’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Jason Martin’s work is held in numerous international private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, and the Schaufler Stiftung Schauwerk Sindelfingen.

(*) Afterwardsness is a concept central to Sigmund Freud‘s model of the unconscious. It is closely linked to the phenomenon of memory and the emergence of repressed memories as meaningful discursive symbols.