Jason Martin

1970, Jersey (Channel Islands), United Kingdom

Jason Martin is a British artist working within the tradition of post-minimalist contemporary painting, while transgressing its boundaries. Trained at Goldsmiths College in London, he belongs to the generation of the Young British Artists, though he maintains his own distinctive, more intimate, silent and material approach.

His work is a radical investigation into gesture, surface and matter. His pieces, made on aluminium, stainless steel or perspex, merge the physicality of sculpture with the lyricism of abstract painting. Dense materials such as oil or acrylic gel are applied with large spatulas, in a single fluid gesture that settles onto the surface as a living, irretrievable trace of time.

Jason Martin restores to painting an almost tactile dimension, in which the viewer does not simply look but "feels" the vibration of the material. His works are contemplative, sensual and silent - an invitation to perceptual immersion, where art becomes pure sensory experience.

Jason Martin

Caliph, 2002
Oil on aluminium, 74 × 74 cm

In Caliph, Jason Martin shapes oil on aluminium as if it were a material breath, sculpted with energy and grace in a single continuous movement. The work, though rigorously abstract, is charged with almost hypnotic suggestions: the material, layered in glossy, incised waves, seems to evoke primordial forms and sensations oscillating between contemplation and vertigo.

The title, Caliph, introduces a regal, spiritual aura, a reference to a higher dimension of guidance and power. But it is in the material itself that the true authority lies: an artistic gesture that becomes archetypal writing, physical presence, but also mental image.
Halfway between abstraction and illusion, this work evokes inner and cosmic landscapes: the density of a forest, the depth of an abyss, the vibration of the sun or the silence of an absolute night. A total sensory experience, where painting represents nothing yet suggests everything, like a silent music or a cosmic surface to be crossed with the gaze.

Today Caliph is part of the private collection of Stefano Rastrelli, testimony to a deep passion for those languages of contemporary art that, even in their abstraction, know how to speak to both heart and mind.