Mauro C. Martinez

Mauro C. Martinez is an emerging American artist living in Laredo, TX. Working primarily in oils, he explores various facets of the human condition. A graduate of Pasadena's renown ArtCenter College of Design (CA), he has shown in both solo and group shows across the southwestern United States.

Aristotle reserved ethos and logos for philosophy and science in his large text, Rhetoric, which dealt with the problem of persuasion as a whole.  Pathos--our innermost sense of feeling and action--was that part of the Rhetoric Aristotle reserved for art, and it's the part Mauro C. Martinez uses as a painter of the cultural landscape. It's not always a lively narrative, but one which resonates with metaphor, irony, grim humor and a multiplicity of painterly styles. Viewers must confront certain painful aesthetic realities in the present visual account—where indifference and banality pair off and collide with the search for truth. Martinez sets common pictorial forms from art history against the monotonous daily brands of the present. His icons are the blurred portraits of the pedestrian, inflatables, instructional signage in subways or airports, the blaze orange of construction warnings and his version of deracinated male and female nudes, which manage to be both monumental yet eerily without context. He paints an art of belatedness and misplaced meanings as if some great, good thing has just-departed--and is not likely to return.