PAUL MARTIN
 

ENCAUSTIC WORK

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• BACK TO: WORKS FOR SALE

• WHERE ECHOES REST EXHIBITION

• ESSAY BY GREGOR SLOSS

• TEXT BY MALCOLM DONEY

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Before the image comes the object: before we begin to read Martin's works we are drawn in by their dazzling surfaces. Surfaces were always hugely important to Martin - he once told a television interviewer that his paintings strived for 'a delicious surface, like ripe fruit' - and were for him a coherence of material and technique.

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Martin's first experiments in encaustic were a response to his studies of the Fayum mummy portraits, but there was nothing experimental about his use of the technique in his mature work. A successful painting, like these encaustics, Martin always saw as one in which meaning and material, image and technique all spoke with a single voice.

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