Chris Martin: The Painter Whose Canvases Have Hidden Messages

The painter Chris Martin lives and works between his homes in Brooklyn and New York’s Catskill Mountains, where he enjoys stargazing away from the light pollution of the city. The cosmic landscapes he observes upstate inform his abstract paintings, many of which approach panoramic proportions. A new show of such works, titled “Speed of Light,” opens this week at Timothy Taylor gallery in TriBeCa. Among the new paintings is “Staring into the Sun 748 Russell Hill Road,” a nearly 20-foot-wide diptych in which a spindly starburst-like form spreads across vividly hued bands that recall hilly horizons. Into both panels, Martin cut out recesses, some of which contain found images of sunsets and taxonomic diagrams of frogs. In a nod to the work’s title, Martin affixed a pair of eclipse-viewing glasses, left over from this past April’s solar event, to the canvas. Another painting, this one untitled, is installed in the center of the gallery, its collaged verso visible to viewers. Martin’s inclusion of found text and imagery on the backs of paintings is a recent development in his practice; he thinks of them “like hidden footnotes or a secret press release, visible only to the collector and the art handlers.”