Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present On the Forest Floor, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based artist Jordan Martins. Co-curated by Jaclyn Jacunski and Teresa Silva, the exhibition brings together a body of work that spans Martins' ongoing series of Sottobosco paintings, large-scale collaged canvases unfolding across the gallery as a sustained meditation on perception, abundance, and what it means to be immersed rather than oriented.

The sottobosco, Italian for "undergrowth," was a minor genre of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting in which the forest floor replaced the table: mossy ground, fallen branches, fungi, nesting birds, and creeping insects arranged with the same loving attention previously reserved for fruit and flowers in still lifes. It is a genre of the overlooked and one that asks the eye to slow down and look at what is underfoot. Martins revives this tradition as a framework for his broader investigation into how images collapse and camouflage, and their abundance becomes indistinguishable.

In canonical Western landscape painting and in the Transcendentalist imagination, the horizon is, for Thoreau, the organizing spiritual element. It orients, clarifies, and holds infinity at a legible distance. But the forest floor refuses that orientation. There is no vanishing point, no line between earth and sky. Instead, Martins's paintings offer abundance that surges from below: roots, organic forms, looping marks, and photographic fragments. The surface itself becomes the site of infinity. What the horizon holds at bay is what makes these paintings intimate and inescapable. Rather than grounding us, they enfold us.

Works like Sottobosco with Thunder and Butterflies and Sottobosco with Sulfur and Mercury stage encounters between elemental forces, organisms, and their persistence; the surfaces are dense with layered marks and color zones that refuse easy reading. The large-scale triptych The Butcher's Stall evokes the paintings after Flemish market scenes and extends Martins' engagement with art history.  

Martins's earlier works in the exhibition enact this logic at a technical level — painted objects becoming photographs, photographic fragments printed, torn, and painted over, canvas collapsing into collage and back again. The newer paintings distill that same instability through a more direct relationship with paint alone, as if the licence of the earlier process has been internalized and is now invited from within a single surface.

The exhibition programming brings Martins' practice into dialogue with sound. Members of the Plathemis Trio, Zander Raymond and Sarah Clausen, will perform alongside the artist, extending the show's investigation of signal and noise and sonic register. The event reflects the curatorial spirit of the exhibition itself: collaborative, community-rooted, and attentive to what is usually held in the background.

For years, Jordan Martins has given enormous energy to Chicago's artistic community, as the former executive director of Comfort Station, as co-director of the cross-cultural exchange project Perto da Lá <> Close to There, as a lecturer, organizer, and constant presence in Chicago. On the Forest Floor is an invitation to be present with his own work: to look closely at what he has been quietly building beneath the surface of all that coordination and care.