Fergus Martin has always been a rigorous type of painter, one who appears to prefer to keep his conflicts well below his still surfaces. In his last few shows, he has been reeling things in further, subduing even the rhythmic, composed brushwork that was something of a trademark in his minimal paintings.
For his latest group of six large-scale paintings, already seen in France, Italy and Limerick, the clues relating to hand movement have been all but eliminated. One or two imperfections in Martin's fields of various shades of brown acrylic suggest the painter at work, but for the most part the visual dynamics are confined to a little play at the top left corner of the frame, where a small triangle of white is placed. These triangles suggest odd-shaped canvases, with their top corner reading initially as part of the whitewashed wall. This offers an unexpected sense of movement, or, to be more precise, a sense of a movement about to begin, or one that has just come to an end. A large degree of the appeal of Martin's recent work was in its modest sense of scale. Keeping them small made their significance fruitfully difficult to assess, but suggested that big ideas were being pressed into small places. Moving to the monolithic scale so beloved of corporate architecture, by contrast, seems like spreading things far too thinly.
Until August 23rd.