Richard Martinez
Gallery Affiliations: DARKE Gallery
Region: Pacific Coast
Website: http://www.richardmartinezpaintings.net
City / State: Walla Walla, WA
My interest in this body of work lies in combining diverse visual elements, borrowing from decoration, architecture, and geometric form. Most recently, I have been exploring the shaped canvas as a part of the work. These paintings employ a variety of painterly languages and visual forms in an effort to create new aesthetic sensibilities.
The idea of the hybrid, taking particular elements from many things and then combining them to make something new, is essential to me.
I hope to create collisions between visual languages generally not seen together. These shaped stretched canvases employ a baroque approach in their blatant sensuality of form, decoration, and the tactile pleasure of paint and color, yet still hold on to a cool, elegant distance found in Modernist aesthetics.