CHRIS MARTIN: SPEED OF LIGHT
Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Speed of Light, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Chris Martin.
January 16 - February 22, 2025
Martin has for nearly five decades invested in a painting practice that privileges process, directness, and an openness to experience. Bringing a vivid gestural freedom to a deep knowledge of the histories of abstraction and an omnivorous appetite for culture, he paints animated compositions that evoke cosmic phenomena, the landscape, and questions of scale. Elements of assemblage appear on Martin’s canvases—he is wide ranging in the vernacular materials he integrates into his paintings: glitter, images ripped from astrophysics books or pop culture magazines, bread, studio detritus, or aluminium foil. The resulting works are characterised by a playful tension between pictorial and actual space, as well as the prosaic and the sublime.
At Timothy Taylor, two diptychs of monumental size appear alongside two large paintings and a small work on a found painting; each of them is evidence of a process in which Martin mines and interweaves wide-reaching cultural, spiritual, and historical references in search of a state of transcendence. The present canvases are variously inspired by the landscape surrounding his studio in the Catskill Mountains, the Souls Grown Deep artists, and jazz music.
The diptych Staring Into The Sun 748 Russell Hill Road (2024) features a piercing white sunburst set against an abstracted pastoral landscape in Martin’s signature attenuated stripes of bold yellow, green, and red. A sliver of sky-blue lines the upper edge of the canvas, emphasising a distant horizon. Across the canvas, Martin has cut out small recesses, some of which contain collaged found images, including sunsets and mountain views, fragments of Rococo paintings, and a taxonomical image of frogs.
The smallest work in the exhibition, Mushroom Cabin (2006–12)—for which Martin painted over a found painting—is a small landscape that pictures the faint silhouette of a cabin, its windows aglow with amber light. Surrounding the structure are ghostly fungal forms that reach up to a white psychedelic moon. Echoes of light loop around the composition, forming subtle pools on the ground. Across these works, Martin meditates on the connections between the macro and the micro, organic and inorganic, knowledge and innocence, tradition and abandon.