Richard Martinez

Richard sees his recent work as an amalgamation of many things; decorative elements, patterns in nature, the sensibilities of the Baroque, and a range of twentieth century painterly approaches. The idea of the hybrid, taking whatever elements are useful from many things and then combining them to make something new, is essential to him. He wants to create collisions between visual languages generally not seen together. These shaped and stretched canvases he makes, employ a baroque approach in their blatant sensuality of form, artifice, and the pleasure of color.
He is after a kind of painting that is multi-linguistic, that can reconcile contradictory visual information, oppositional aesthetics and retain them as distinct things at the same time.
The spatial information is ambiguous, as the paintings evoke atmospheric spaces in some places, while in others they are covered with marks that make issue of the flatness of the canvas. The simplified baroque shapes of the canvases emphasize their physical presence and assert themselves as sculptural objects, yet they are still paintings. They make issue of the tension between surface and illusion. They are primarily abstract, though not purely.
Ultimately he is interested in making paintings that are unusual, and ambiguous in some way, yet ultra-beautiful and familiar at the same time.