Emilio Martinez’ “Mother of Us” + “Father of Us. ” (2014–2015)
“It’s like giving birth,” Emilio Martinez will say when asked about his artistic process. “The idea is conceived, and at the moment it’s ready to be born, it is.” He moves without haste, he feels deliberately, and he questions himself, all the while encoding memories and observations that will prove fruitful when the time comes to allow his vision to burst forth.
Martinez’ approach to creative expression is made possible through a grounded coupling of dichotomies. These include: scenes that are elegantly chaotic, or chaotically elegant depending on one’s interpretation; characters that are equally primordial and divine at the intersections of grim and cheeky; fluid intentionality, akin to pragmatic morals in children’s fables; art and love for their own sake; self-assured, rebellious sensibilities. His life experiences and influences further reflect these qualities. Miami, known for its vibrant aesthetics, became home to Martinez and his family in the 90’s, a move from the pristine Honduran countryside steeped in centuries-long oral traditions in place of Saturday morning cartoons. This would become a crucial turning point in the bearing of an a dreamer-cum-artist whose visual language is less about world-building than it is about reflecting the world as he knows it.
Two of the numerous large-scale canvas works in his eclectic North Miami studio, Father of Us and Mother of Us, though they embody the energies of those who conceive the world, carry the same duality that Martinez embraces, and that which charges existence and its creation in a similar fashion. Their essences transcend the concepts of “mom” and “dad” into gestural, Neo-Expressionist entities embodying his own relationship with his self-made artistic endeavor.
Initially a commission intended to become an abstract oeuvre, Mother of Us is a progenitor of self-affirmation forged from defiance. The central mother figure, one-eyed and white with outstretched arms, can be mistaken for a peacemaker if the smaller and meeker figures she safeguards are overlooked. The mother is a fierce and unworldly shield before she is an agent of cultivation, and a representative of Martinez’ ethos with a firm reign over chaos and discomfort; remnants of the artist’s original intention can be found under layered swells of both tension and benevolence, with sorrowful grays and blues functioning as mementos of what could have been self-betrayal. The central figure in Father of Us is, contrastingly, stoic and foreboding as it presides over less amorphous characters. The father on this canvas is emblematic of grace in the context of time, perhaps an allusion to Martinez’ faith, and a direct contrast to its spiritual counterpart, occupying a scene where unruliness and, more noticeably, fear, are neither invisible nor finished with, but kept at bay through tender shades of pink and green. Martinez’ subversive intertwining of broader, more mercurial constructions of gender, spirituality, and freedom imply that Mother of Us and Father of Us operate as two halves of a singular aura. These pieces’ poignant energy, when recognized in tandem, is characteristically reflexive in nature insofar as it is, unquestionably, inextricable from Martinez’ essence itself.
Emilio Martinez. Father of Us, 2014. Acrylic, pencil, and charcoal on canvas.
Written by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco for Emilio Martinez.
Mother of Us & Father of Us, 2014–2015. Acrylic, pencil, and charcoal on canvas.