Wasabi Sunrise is a revisiting and extension of the ideas and processes underpinning Leigh Martin’s previous Loaded series (2007-2013) of paintings. After a hiatus of ten years Martin has returned to continue and extend explorations based upon the Loaded series in combination with his Dissolve series (1998-2006). The motivation in these earlier bodies of works was born of an interest in monochrome and minimalist painting of the 60s and an awareness in what Max Kozloff coined ‘abstract luminism’ that was explored by a number of ‘process painters’ in Britain and Europe in the 1990s when Martin was a student at the Glasgow School of Art. All of these practitioners privileged colour, materiality and ‘objecthood’ as the primary constituents of their practice. Although the more recent bodies of work are no longer monochromatic, to date they have often, employed a minimal syntax, revealing the process of making and an intensity of experience that may not easily be articulated linguistically. Up until Wasabi Sunrise there had been little of the artist’s hand evident and the paintings seemed mute in terms of any obvious narrative outside of the process, but now they demand interaction through their materiality. The artist describes this further, “I do not resort to representation but wish to present the gaze with an authentic moment of perception. One where the viewer may relate to the work via another sense or senses, a synaesthetic set of relations”