Phase III, To Foil Oils, #13, 1997

Winton and Newton oils on canvas

signed, titled and dated 1997 on the stretcher

30 × 22 in (76.2 × 55.9 cm)

Auction Estimate:$20,000 - $30,000

Sale date:June 9, 2021

Price Realized

$43,200

(including Buyer's Premium)

Provenance

Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Exhibited

Ron Martin: To Foil Oils Phase III and IV, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, 1999

Literature

Walter Klepac, Ron Martin, To Foil Oils Phase III and IV, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, 1999, unpaginated, reproduced as Phase III Aug. 1, 1997, #13

Ron Martin paints in series, exhausting his objective before moving on to the next. In his artist statement Martin remarks: “...the idea of realising in a group of serial abstract paintings a multiplicity of mental perspectives rooted to the specification of the medium through its relation to colour, material, and sensation provides viewers with the means to appreciate a rich and inexhaustible mother load of perception.” In the “To Foil Oils Phase III and IV” series, exhibited at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in 1998, Martin continues his practice of the exploration of paint and its all-over application on canvas. However, instead of acrylic, he chooses to employ pure oil paint applied directly from the tube onto the canvas. Walter Klepac writes in the exhibition catalogue, “One way to think of the To Foil Oils is to see them in terms of the task of setting 100 colours of the Winton and Newton series into play on a single canvas, and to do so in a way that the singularity and the brilliant clarity of each is preserved and enhanced.” The artist has laid out the pigment in a pattern of seven circles of various sizes, repeating the pattern between canvases as the series continues making slight variations with regards to the size and placement of the circles. Martin has also employed a wavy line of a single colour in between these groupings that he refers to as “trimmings”. Looking at the canvases that precede “Phase III, To Foil Oils, #13” and the ones that follow, Martin continues his approach of having colours from the outer ring of the circles move to form the main colour of the inner circles of the next, as well as introducing into the circles a background colour. Klepac remarks, “Throughout these series Martin relies, in very different ways, on such devices as a standardized structural format, repetition, and the use of certain elements as constants and as variables.”