Untitled #7, 1981

Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Ontario Michael Gibson Gallery, London, Ontario Private Collection

Ron Martin, 'A Justification for Abstraction 1988', in "Ron Martin: 1971-1981", Toronto, 1989, page 106 Walter Klepac, "Ron Martin, To Foil Oils Phase III and IV", Toronto, 1999, unpaginated

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. He paints in series, exhausting his objective before moving on to the next. In 1974, Martin began painting black paintings, a colour that he focused on until 1981. The gestural paintings shared a consistent and pre-defined method of working. The artist would constrain himself to a specific size of canvas, a specific amount of black paint and a fixed amount of time to make each black painting. 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.”