Pow Martinez at MO_Space presents an installation of sculptural works that explore painting’s reflexive autonomy and expansive expression to denote the medium’s continued significance and multi-faceted practice.

Painting, mainly as a flat surface limited by its span of width and height, contains an infinite number of information codified into multitudinous gestural marks that cover its surface. The world at large becomes a source pool of stimuli projecting to the painter various data: whether it’s color, sound, scent, texture, shape that combined altogether turns into an impression of life. How this is all processed as memorable experience is something of a mystery, with the painter as an alchemical master transforming pure nothingness into substantial evidence.

Painting is a compressed reality. Within it, everything happens all at the same time—synchronic, operating on focused space to record the reconstituted form of the world flowing from the artist’s brush, with the body acting as data storage and translational device. Thus, it is a slow medium born from organic processing and handling, with the acknowledgment that it takes time to read painting conceptually and to imaginatively experience everything simultaneously. Such has been the case, which after a long history of representational signage painting, has evolved into an awareness of its own materiality, with its structural support and its surface phenomena becoming critical focus in themselves. It is an awareness that seems to disregard its own previous incarnation as a mimetic vehicle, following a rebellious bildungsroman to gain autonomy as an expression of pure aesthetic experience.

Thus, in fidelity to the narrative of self-admonition to gain independence from prior constricting conventions, the lure of painting now has to once again reassert its material condition not only towards theatrical proportions, but to also re-insert the author’s voice as an ironic foil to essentialist gravitas.

Pow Martinez’ works enter the picture here as an extension of painting—that is, painting by other means in an expanded field. The works are sculptural, having taken three-dimensional form, and yet are painterly in the sense that they are textured and tactile, with their screen-like visual impact given priority over the objects’ character in the round. The objects are slapped together brutally, similar to the artist’s trademark gauche, expressionist marks: choppy, garish, whimsical, devil-may-care, jarring, abstruse. Altogether, the objects don’t appear the same as everyday objects, but are quite removed from this plane of reality regardless of their tangible presence. They are absurd and aggressively funny whilst collectively pursuing a narrative of internal logic, self-referentiality, and indifference to external pressure. As Pow Martinez has shown, painting’s form and appearance may have changed today, but its consciousness and sensibility extends beyond its convention and material identity.

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