Jorge Martins

Between 1957 and 1961, he attended the Architecture and Painting courses at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon. In 1958 he took up printing at the SCGP. In 1961 he moved to Paris, but in the period from 1965 to 1971 he would regularly spend time at Vieira da Silva's studio. After 13 years away from home, Martins briefly visited Portugal; and after a short stay in New York, he returned to Paris in 1976. In 1991, no less than 30 years after he left, the artist returned to his home country. ¶ In the turn of the 50s and the 60s, Martins began as an heir to the then-called "abstract neo-impressionism". He would soon, however, break away from the "wistful abstractionism", taking on a "neo-figurativism" that puts across a very peculiar, intimate dimension. ¶ The 60s, which witness in Martins a growing economy of simplicity, are a key point in time in terms of the artist's recognition. Light will become the unifying element of the artist's explorations, and it will also become the central theme of his representation: sources of light, light as the immanent presence of the support, the canvas's very surface as a result of light, colours as the resulting objects of the play of light and shadow, light as the shaping agent of objects. ¶ Throughout the 70s, his canvas became saturated with colour but towards the final years of the decade it would swerve back towards abstraction, although it would always fluctuate in between abstraction and figurativism. At the same time, words became an integrant part of signification. ¶ Jorge Martins dedicated himself to a systematic, thorough study of the theory of light and colour in the following decades, which led him to the most shadowy pictorial approaches he ever created, and which would be exhibited at Culturgest in 1991. ¶ In all of his oeuvre, the enigmatic is an element that emerges through the interplay of light occulting/revealing, as well as his constant re-inscription of every object, figure or sign on a different level, in a different spatial-time domain. The very characters are enigmatic by their formal lack of definition: they are almost-letters, almost-numbers, almost-signs, perhaps hieroglyphs. The same ambiguity is present quite often in the images and figures he evokes. The ensuing tension between rhythm (flux of colour or light) and sign (a stop, a moment that is distinguished from the flux) is only a supplementary corroboration of this condition, which one may consider paradigmatic of Jorge Martins' work.

 

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