My work has gone through many changes in the more than forty years that I have been painting. Manet’s statement still resonates for me: To be concise in art is both necessary and elegant. Luminosity is still the goal, oil paint on canvas still the preferred medium, shape and color still the plastic means to speak my particular expression.
Martin Canin’s work clearly obeys the well-known definition of color field painting: “Color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself.” Large fields of color spread into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface.
Though at first it would be easy to associate his paintings to the work of color field artists like Barnett Newman or Jack Bush, Canin’s large canvases maintain a distinctive lyrical aspect that separate them from pure geometry and plunge them into a subtle emotional realm. Asymmetry is a constant, often reinforced by the use of polygonal frames whose parts fail to correspond to one another in shape or size.
With a career spanning over forty-five years, bright vibrant colors have been the preferred syntax, at times alternating with darker periods. However, even when gray and black are the only colors present on the canvas, Canin always magically achieves his ultimate goal: luminosity.