Narsiso Martinez:

Rethinking Essential

From August 14, 2022

By Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator

Between high-impact surfaces and textures, the work of Narsiso Martinez proposes a fundamentally experimental investigation. His paintings and installations begin from a playful approach to materials, mostly simple elements, found in his physical and representative environment. This is a creative approach that is not accidental: there is an intrinsic coherence there, a symbolic closeness between the medium and its content.

In the artist's work we always find something urgent. His investigations, reflections and questions go beyond the limits of the official, through stories that are often silenced or underestimated by the prevailing narrative.

Beneath corrugated folds, he underlays an interest in reclaiming the place of creation as a tool for transformation and social justice, as a banner of a decolonization of the status quo, and the artist as a seeker in the margins, a ragpicker of history.

Martínez's paintings require no explanation. Meditative contemplation alone reveals life stories, many of them from indigenous communities, which the artist has managed to document from various avenues: from his own experiences, through talks and encounters with the actual protagonists in his work. Here, we find the fight of the millions of displaced peoples who struggle against being left out of the established margins, and who defend human dignity in the face of exploitation and helplessness.

The installation that we present here was specially designed for the MOLAA gallery and its subsequent exhibition at ICA San Diego. In addition to the strength of its visual poetics, the exhibition is also a way to raise awareness and propose new conversations on issues that cannot be postponed and that involve us all. Rethink what is essential in a post-pandemic context to build a more dignified future. That's what it's about. Art transforms and can always be the beginning of something better.

Narsiso Martinez’s paintings and mixed media installations include individual portraits and multi-figure compositions of farm laborers set against the agricultural landscapes and brand designs of grocery store produce boxes. Drawn from his own experience as a farm worker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farm workers are executed on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by inter-war Social Realism and European Realism, Martinez’s work makes visible the difficult labor and onerous working conditions of the American farm worker.

Narsiso Martinez (Mexico, 1977) migrated to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. To finance his education, Martinez worked seasonally in the apple orchards of Eastern Washington for nine years. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in 2009 from Los Angeles City College. In the fall of 2012 Narsiso earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach. In the spring of 2018 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach, and was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally. Narsiso’s work is in the permanent collections of the LBMA, the Crocker Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, the Santa Barbara Museum, and others. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.

Support:

This exhibition is in collaboration with The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Additional support provided by the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition.