Jean-Marie Martin

My academic education was between the years 1973-1987 beginning with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Laval University (Quebec), a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn) and coursework for a Doctor of Art from New York University (no dissertation). My paintings during this period were derivative of the major currents of the time: minimalism, conceptual, performance and video art.

Between 1987 and 2010, I explored the concept of landscape painting guided by the appropriation of objects or words that were evocative. For example, instead of painting the ocean I would use a blue matrix in which I placed a real aquarium with fish on to the canvas. I was also incorporating sentences with social and environmental meaning concerning toxic products like asbestos canvas and lead paint. In other words, I was striving to build a visual landscape and not just referencing it.

For the last six years, I have been returning to a reductive painting (in the sense that I only use a minimum of elements: canvas, paint, stretchers, frame). This current approach to my art involves a balance between gestural paint and a formal, geometric constructed background. A balance that invokes, for example, the tension between a square painting divided into four sections held together by an aluminum or wood frame and a repetitive gestural motif made by hand using a limited choice of colors, blue, black, grey and some metallic accents. The add-on stretchers and openings create a window that reveal the painting construction and make the painting more than just a two dimensional plane surface to become a tri-dimensional object painting.

My new paintings (deconstruction paintings, homage paintings, object paintings) are not only seeking to engage the viewers with a visual experience but take them into an evocative transcending space. In my eyes, abstract painting is still totally open to new discovery and immense new possibilities.