Scraped off Black Painting by Ronald Albert Martin

Provenance:
Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Ron Martin ‘A Justification for Abstraction 1988’ in “Ron Martin: 1971-1981”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1989, page 106

Born and raised in London, Ontario, Ron Martin has been associated with the London Regionalism group of artists, which included Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers and Paterson Ewen. Influenced by Curnoe’s interest in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, Martin developed a strategic and conceptual approach to abstract painting. Often working in series, Martin produced distinct groupings of monochromatic Black Paintings through the late 1970s which shared a consistent and pre-defined method of working. Martin’s “scrapped off” paintings of 1979 contrast sharply with the thick, almost sculptural impastos of his previous Black Paintings. These works were executed with a reductive technique where the artist removed, scrapped and gouged paint from the surface. Lacking obvious brushstrokes, the scrapped off paintings appear as objects formed over time by natural forces. The varied surface of the work absorbs and reflects light in a complex way, with the thinly-coated areas taking on a metallic silver quality.

Martin emphasized the importance of the viewer’s intellectual engagement with his work, writing: “When I was installing the scraped-off black paintings in a 1981 show at the AGO, they looked like empty-blank surfaces with nothing on them. It took an act of the will, through an intense process of observation, to redeem their familiarity. And it was not until this had happened that I realized that the making of these paintings has been reduced absolutely to a physical process that was, in turn, the container for psychic projection, ‘pure’ and ‘simple’. By pure, I mean the idea and by simple, I mean the symbol. Idea and symbol go hand and hand. You cannot have one without the other.”