Jason Martin
Folk Law

De Brock is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition with Jason Martin, opening in presence of the artist on April 19 from 6 till 8 pm.

Early traditions in British abstraction gained a wider cultural profile beyond the English Channel after Ben Nicholson began his mapped relief painting / wall sculptures circa 1930.

Whilst entirely resourceful and ingenious of their time it is interesting to locate the origin of his newfound dystopic pictorial space. By that and to be precise: no horizon.

In his discovery of Alfred Wallis, an awkward and illiterate mariner, a modern ‘primitive’ living in St Ives Cornwall painting on discarded found material he found by chance a bridge to assimilate his own enquiry.

If, as I believe all the best abstraction has a root in figuration, there must be some reward in allowing an indulgence of interpretation towards a cross dressing of genres or districts of thought.

My tendency towards landscape can’t be hidden.

I can openly admit that the references or recollections towards natural world phenomena have silenced more purist theoretical clarification.

Often the reference is of hair, feathers and shells.

This figuration has always been for me a default interpretation that I never consciously pursued. No intention but curiously valid all the same.

Malevich and Mondrian evolved their abstraction from the root of figuration the latter morphing trees to arrive at his hard-edge grids. I would not claim otherwise, however abstraction dictates a set of principles and you pitch your tent on ground you are evangelically confident with.

My early lust for reductionism gave me a mandate of thought that embraced minimalism albeit without the fecund notion of eradicating the personal touch not least an arm led gesture. This may seem anathema to the academic and historically learned however never had it occurred to me to dismiss expressionism and with it a figurative dirty compromise.

Herein lies for me an interesting complex ideal.

If there is an ambivalence towards the anthropomorphic trace contained in a brushstroke with a reach & given agency by what we consider in literary terms gestural abstraction, can we frame that agency reconciled tempered and cured through a non-orthodox minimalist coupling.

Can they get along? What if these values were either by conscious understanding rejected or blissfully vacant to start.

A terrible deficiency in the provenance of ideas. If we start from nothing, and we make something from that, this is surely a triumph in possibility.

To take something already that is more than a nothing and change it to something else something other, this is not so interesting.

Suppose an enquiry of painting simultaneously socially aware yet antisocial, in a wider more profane context, affords passage to render a retroactive meaning and without prejudice.

The more common interpretation over many years has been a paradox of inferred reference. My “peculiar pictorial language“ and the associative meaning attributed to it through a range of approaches in mediums has been at once virtuous yet challenging.

From here and possibly free of such shackles there might arise new approaches to arrive at or at least dine at the same table of ideas historically journeyed from opposite beginnings.

It seems to me we are today moving towards a positive reclamation or review of older concerns that found truth fundamentally by those impervious and ambivalent to a culturally refined critique.

A return of the folk hero and the wise primitive.

— Jason Martin, April 2025