Emilio Martinez’ “Channeling the Old Masters” (2021)
Emilio Martinez is a Honduran-born artist based in Miami, Florida working with collage, painting, and sculpture. The youngest of six boys raised by his mother in both the Honduran countryside and the urbanscapes of Miami, his aesthetic is rooted in what he refers to as “fragments,” taking what can be argued is the yoke of the human experience—the continuation of all that has come before us and anxiety for what is ahead—and finding liberty in the dichotomies of existence through intuitive and reflexive interpretations.
Martinez’ body of work is an assemblage of folkloric visions from his childhood, his faith, and his enduring reverence for the old Masters, employing meticulous conviction and an ardent curiosity to spark a larger dialogue about the fullness of the nature of humanity. His juxtaposing of the visual languages upon which his is based with a raw, even visceral, take on the construction of truths coalesces into a brilliant dissection of dread, history, and tenacity, presented as not a warning or rumination, but an intimate codex of his own imagination.
Channeling the Old Masters is a collage opus featuring Martinez’ signature characters: harbingers of hope and fear baring fangs; chimeras heralding the often-invisible yet omnipresent chaos of man in their long fingernails; cheeky, grotesque desires in the form of angels wearing yellow boots; meditations on purity; made from and pasted on history book pages that function as a catalogue of the artist’s introspection. His engagement with the grotesque, in particular, begs the question of what fully constitutes the Self, be it a response to that which surrounds a person or the creation of an internal mythos, situated in their imagination. Martinez’ pieces, quintessentially so, assert that the answer to this cannot be found in the pockets of life that evoke softness or loveliness alone.
Emilio Martinez. Angel, 2021. Paper collage; acrylic and pencil on Art History textbook paper. 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches.
In Angel (2021), an example befitting to the series, Martinez presents a thoughtfully crude, multi-eyed figure that can be interpreted as neither sinister nor playful, despite its ornate ensemble and french-tipped nails, intentionally obscuring the crux of a 1570 version of Veronese’s Annunciation, wherein the Virgin, Mary, receives the news of her immaculate conception, with a postmodern version of the complex emotions Baroque artists, in this case, only alluded to in calculated, well-concealed symbols. Martinez’ vision of an angel, closer to its biblical origins than that of Veronese’s looking over its right shoulder, eclipses these from its position in the foreground, protecting the sanctity of the message and integrating a reminder that the concepts of good and evil cannot exist apart from one another in the same breath. His allowing of the angel Gabriel and Mary to flank the principal angel’s sides from their original positions further embodies Martinez’ ability to stitch these fragments—such as Mary’s reluctance, the purity of a dove, a visually and emotionally disruptive omen with an eye for a heart—deftly and forcefully provoking a new perspective on the ideas and traditions of antiquity without forsaking the privilege of living past them.
Written by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco for Emilio Martinez.
Channeling the Old Masters, 2021. Works on paper.