As Chris Martin blazes his way through his sixth decade as a painter, his devotional, ever-expansive approach to his medium and its materials reveals new experiential data about the past, present, and future of painting. In Memory of My Feelings—whose title is borrowed from a poem by New York School poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)—includes small-, medium-, and large-scale canvases, produced over the last few years, in which many of Martin’s key motifs are given new twists and turns. As the show’s title makes clear, the results of this recent studio output exemplify the commitments to emotional connection, experimentation, play, and communication that Martin has foregrounded throughout his career.

In his evocations of the natural world, for instance, Martin creates a spectrum of moods. Several paintings are rooted in the experience of feeling dwarfed by the night sky; at the same time, the glitter, foam discs, and bursts of dripping acrylic color that define their surfaces give them a sense of closeness and intimacy. The artist generates a continuum in which the material and immaterial, and the worlds inside and outside the studio, coexist and fertilize one another. Martin has often described his work in terms of the landscape genre, and his process sometimes involves working en plein air, where both he and his work are exposed to the elements. Even when he is working in the studio, though, he prioritizes permeability and openness.

This means that the recurring forms that appear in his paintings are only partially about establishing a sense of familiarity within the trajectory of the work as it evolves from year to year. Like the identifiable themes of jazz standards, these forms provide the scaffolding for improvisation, invention, and freefalls into the unknown. The colorful, organically undulating stripes and columns that anchor several new paintings, for example, contain innumerable subtleties and textural details. Martin’s painterliness is a vessel for possibility: he has painted one of these column compositions on raw canvas, turning an otherwise heady, graphic array into an earthbound, tactile study that has as much to do with collage, assemblage, and even sculpture as it does with visual abstraction.

This physicality is a prominent feature throughout the show, and one through which Martin reaches out to the world of cultural influences and inspirations that sometimes make his project feel more like a community than a one-person endeavor. His own role as a catalyst for several generations of artists in Brooklyn, upstate New York, and beyond already frames his work in a collective context; so do the images, objects, and titles that become part of the paintings themselves. Silver Cycles (2026) is an aluminum-foil-covered canvas whose title refers to the album design of a record of the same name by jazz musician Eddie Harris. A spray-painted black line acts as an internal framing device, as well as a nod to a minimalist vocabulary that functions, contrary to expectations, in a non-minimal way, as if painted lines and the lines Harris played on his saxophone might flow from a common source.

Despite his impassioned commitment to material experimentation, and his generous ability to rearticulate artistic homage as a powerful genre in its own right—inspirations for works on view include the life of a sister who recently died (and her horse) and the mountain landscapes of the Catskills, to name a few—Martin’s most important muses might be the forces in life that are most ephemeral and least visible. The presences of movement, change, freedom, emotional exuberance, and especially time are all palpable. As some works in this show make clear, he remains open to discovering new ways in which a given painting can evolve, either from moment to moment or from season to season. In some cases, years or even decades pass as he adds layers, changes thematic orientations, and waits.

One untitled work in the show bears the dates 1988-2018, indicating it has undergone a journey of almost forty years from inception to exhibition; collaged images of an ankh and a car take center stage, resting within thick layers of accumulated paint and other elements that function like geological strata. Such works challenge the notion that a painting is a singular thing, suggesting instead that a finished picture can be built on top of—and from—the remains of many previous ones that existed before it. In another multi-layered, untitled work (2019-2023), the largest in the show, wavy horizontal bands of black and white seem to starkly assert that abstraction and landscape are inseparable categories in the human imagination. Underneath the bands, however, in the ridges, ripples, and remnants left behind over the course of its making, lies something that might be best described as the soul of a painting grappling with its feelings and emotional transformations, or as the record of Martin’s own ongoing feeling-based transformation in the crucible of painting.