Phase III, To Foil Oils, #13 by Ronald Albert Martin
Ron Martin
Phase III, To Foil Oils, #13
winton and newton oils on canvas
signed, titled and dated 1997 on the stretcher
30 x 22 ins ( 76.2 x 55.9 cms )
Auction Estimate: $20,000.00 - $30,000.00
Price Realized $43,200.00
Sale date: June 9th 2021
Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Ron Martin: To Foil Oils Phase III and IV, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, 1999
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
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.”
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Ronald Albert Martin
(1943)
Ron Martin, painter (b at London, Ont 28 April 1943). Ron Martin studied at H.B. Beal Secondary School in London, Ont, began working in a studio shared with Murrary FAVRO in 1964, and had his first solo exhibition in Jack Pollock's gallery in Toronto in 1965. Martin admired Jackson Pollock, Milton Resnick and other Abstract Expressionists, and his interest quickly turned to abstraction.
Martin has consistently worked in series, such as the monochromatic "Bright Red Paintings" of 1972 and the subsequent "Black Paintings," with which he was engaged from 1974 to 1981. In these series he employed a wide range of techniques: pouring, brushing, scraping, and using his bare hands, and consistently worked on the floor or other flat surfaces. The monochromatic paintings began as vigorously gestural works and then evolved into thin surfaces, from which much of the paint had been scraped away, and ultimately to highly textured accumulations of dense, encrusted acrylic. The "Black Paintings" represented Canada (along with Henry Saxe's sculptures) at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
Throughout his career, Martin has rigorously moved on from each series to other quite different ones. The "Black Paintings" were followed by much sparer grid works, the "Geometric Paintings" (1981-85), and then by the more painterly "Black, White and Grey Paintings." In the 1990s he created a number of series based on a configuration of circles, using oil paint squeezed directly from the tube.
Martin often set arbitrary constraints on his process, eg, limiting a painting to one gallon of paint, two gallons or twenty gallons. Or he might set a time limit to the production of each work. These procedures suggest an affinity with conceptual art, but Martin also views them, and other aspects of his artmaking, as in keeping with Leonardo's advice to the artist to "look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour" so that "the spirit [will be] quickened to new inventions." Martin therefore places Leonardo in a line of thought leading to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and on the basis of their work he takes it for granted that "the creative process is an unconscious" one that functions best when the artist is focused on the sheer materiality of painting.
In 2012 Ron Martin was awarded a Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts.
