FIGURE/BACKGROUNDJorge Martins’s painting is immensely diverse and now very extensive. His career has spanned an almost encyclopaedic spectrum of the practice of painting (and drawing), alternating between moments of figuration and periods during which openly formal concerns supplant recognition of the forms. In the latter field he has carried out a broad set of paintings on light since 1967, stepping into figuration and into the luminic models since the Renaissance, starting from the base of the metaphor of light that has formed much of rationalist thought since Descartes. The works that belong to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos are from a different field, in which the placing of problems of composition, of the unity of the pictorial surface and of rhythm occupy the centre of Martins’s work. Sometimes in his work (particularly in a set of paintings from the mid-eighties) there is a literalising of one of the main categories of painting, probably the one that has led to most ink flowing over the abstraction/figuration dichotomy: the figure/background relationship. A central aspect in the set of paintings made from forms that stand out on the canvas are “verticals”, which are structured like bodies and which on the inside are fragments of another painting from which they seem to have been taken. The figures that are drawn out on the neutral background of the canvas seem to bring up a questioning on its status as a figure, or of a background that can be glimpsed. A different instance of meaning seems to emerge in their scale and their almost glittering polychrome character, an enormous undecipherable calligraphy, like the blow up of a fragment, the whole canvas.Delfim Sardo