After spending several years in Lisbon, where he converted a former nightclub into an art studio, Jason Martin moved to the countryside of Comporta in 2015. Here, award-winning architect Souto de Moura converted a former agricultural warehouse into a creative retreat for him, surrounded only by vast rice fields. More recently, he finally settled in nearby Melides, in the peaceful Alentejo region, between the ocean and a plain of extraordinary biodiversity. «I always identify nature as the model to which painting should aspire. I experiment with nature and use it, but I don't imitate it» says the artist. These words translate into a concrete life choice when, in 2013, Martin purchases a 2.5-hectare vineyard and starts producing wine with handmade bottles, culminating in the Impossible Vineyards edition (2013). This experimental attitude runs through the entire work of Martin, known for redefining the language of painting. The British artist reinterprets the great masters of the 20th century, starting with their specific gestures: «Artists at the turn of the century painted with their wrists. Braque and Picasso, to create their cubist paintings, drew lines by articulating movements with their elbows. De Kooning, with his shoulder, made even broader brushstrokes. Finally, Pollock laid the canvas on the floor and painted with his whole body». Through a personal technique, Jason Martin blends abstract expressionism, action painting, and art aimed at erasing all traces of the body, «as if I had filled the empty vessel of minimalism», he says. Another example of this openness to the most original creative languages is the design of the Lady Dior bag (2016). It is in this self-imposed exile that Jason Martin refines his unmistakable aesthetic. As he stated during his solo exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2009, his is a “mono-language” without waste: every gesture, every pour of oil falls onto the surface, composing abstract landscapes that defy categorization. «I mull over the ultimate meaning of a work for hours. Each painting has a very specific emotional identity», says the artist. In Martin's work, the pictorial material itself becomes landscape. The color is applied with brushes, spatulas, blades, and industrial combs, tools that allow him to engrave, comb, and shape the surface with an almost sculptural gesture, generating a synesthetic language where every mark becomes - in the artist's words - «testimony to time». Following the trail left by these “alternative brushes”, the viewer retraces the creative gesture and discovers works that stand on a double threshold: between painting and sculpture, due to their pronounced material and three-dimensional impact; between abstraction and landscape, as the surfaces seem to allude to horizons or natural flows, rendering an almost atmospheric perception of space. An abstraction that reinterprets and surpasses the expressionism of Franz Kline and the modernism of Robert Ryman - studied at Goldsmiths University in London. Gesture, technique, and visual result collide in a single concept, which represents Martin's true hallmark: energy. Each painting seems to contain the artist's gesture still in progress, as if the creative act had never ended and the surface continued to record its trace.