Chris Martin: Staring into the sun

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Chris Martin is deep into a nearly five-decade-long artistic odyssey fueled by an unrelenting passion for process, spontaneity, and embracing the unexpected. His prolific energy, both physical and creative, melds into his broad knowledge of painting history and an insatiable desire to share his thoughts, feelings, and vast collection of everyday ephemera and small objects by embedding them in paint on canvas. Martin’s paintings are bursts of assemblage showcasing the power of proximity – vibrant cacophonies of glitter, pages ripped from textbooks books, magazine remnants, letters, and newspaper clippings. “Speed of Light,” his second solo exhibition with Timothy Taylor, draws inspiration from the dark night sky in the Catskills, inflecting profound questions about the universe with a comedian’s flair for the seriously absurd. The results are thought-provoking, funny, and, at times, ecstatic. 

A staunch opponent of traditional art school dogma, Martin has long railed against the practice of studio critiques, believing that the rigidity of the format stifles creativity and replaces joy with doubt and anxiety. Painting should not be a struggle but rather an act of unbridled expression. He honed this philosophy from his undergrad experiences at Yale, which he left before his junior year to immerse himself in the artistic energy of New York City. There he attempted “serious abstract paintings” in the vein of the Bowery luminaries – Jake Berthot, and  Brice Marden, among others. With disarming honesty, he describes the monolithic works he made in the early years as awful.

In his forties, while working as an art therapist with AIDS patients lacking traditional art training, his perspective profoundly shifted. He realized that the merit of their work, by conventional aesthetic standards, was irrelevant. The paintings weren’t good or bad. Despite less skillful use of materials, they were full of emotion and wrenchingly compelling content. Against that backdrop, Martin began to see much of NYC art discourse as hollow and useless. Another, more upbeat epiphany came by way of fellow artist and Williamsburg studio mate Katherine Bradford, who noticed a stark contrast between Martin’s paintings and his sketchbooks. The latter brimmed with humor, eclectic ideas, and the unfiltered essence of a creative spirit. Her penetratingly simple question was, why not bring that same energy into your paintings? It made perfect sense: the early Williamsburg aesthetic was ultimately marked by a prodigious interest in mischief and wit.

Martin’s unconventional approach has endured. While many painters grapple with the compulsion to “fix” a painting by obliterating the elements that work – sacrificing the parts for the whole – Martin’s solution is the radical inverse: he cuts the part he likes out of the canvas, patching the void with new fabric. He keeps the other piece to use someday in another painting, or pastes it on the back of the canvas to convey a secret message to collectors and art handlers. The canvases are full of inside painting jokes — ignoring Bauhaus color strategies and formulaic compositional approaches — while embracing accident and imperfection. “Speed of Light,” like most of Martin’s shows, is a celebration of experimentation, humor, and boundless inquisitiveness. In his first show at Timothy Taylor’s NYC gallery, Martin continues to let his freak flag fly.

Chris Martin, “Speed of Light,” Timothy Taylor, 74 Leonard Street, New York, NY, 10013; Jan 16 – Feb 22

About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.