02/25/08
Text: Donari Braxton
The problem with tackling the new show of an artist whom you already highly esteem is that you’re prone to making biased judgments. Having greatly respected the work of Chris Martin—and the man himself—for a while now, I was cheery-eyed before I even set foot into his winter opening at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, now Martin’s home base in Chelsea. But all full disclosure prejudices aside, Martin's solo show thrills on its own merits.
The strength of Martin’s work lies in its congenial, symptomatically intimate longevity, similar to good pieces of music whose lyrics sink into the brain. His paintings deliberately reach to strike subjective chords, in some cases making you deliriously feel as if you'd made them. (Half the opening, I wondered why no one had stopped to congratulate me.) Yes, there’s the raw artisan beauty of the canvasses, matted in disjointed vinyls or shellacked Wonder Bread, but beyond them one really gets a sense of the sheer metric of so-called modern ‘abstraction.’ “Clearly, the heroic early years of abstraction as something pure, with a special claim to truth or advanced thinking—all that is past,” Martin explains. In its place, we get a non-linear projection of emotionality, a return “to the body, and what the body knows,” poised in many ways to transcend the intellectual currency of ‘abstract’ art.
Of course, it’s all the more fitting that Chris Martin, an outspoken thinker on the abstract idiom who has published articles on the subject with Fred Tomaselli, Richard Tuttle and Agnes Martin, is first in line to disown the term ‘abstraction.’ Though ‘abstraction,’ Martin reminds us, is a consequence of freedom from the image, it’s not in being abstract that art is automatically free. Rather, it seems 'artful abandon' comes more conversely from the kind of synergetic pull we look for in any form of art. “We have an easier time doing this with music,” muses Martin. “For instance when very loud James Brown music fills the room, we don't usually worry about the form, structure, and context of what we're hearing. [But] we can groove to painting in the same way...”
Chris Martin's work is up through March 1st 2008
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th St. New York, NY
