José Horacio Martinez

José Horacio Martínez was born in Buga, Colombia in 1961 and started painting in the early 1980’s. In 1994 he was awarded with the First Prize at the XXXV National Artist Salon of Colombia, which meant for him the first great positioning of his work and the determination in his practice, creating a style of painting that reinvents itself constantly. An expanded painting, as a vital and quotidian exercise that encourages the viewer to get close to the inapprehensible, and that could not be achieved by any other medium.
Martinez is not a painter with a formula. On the contrary, his itinerary is marked by ruptures, risks and the intention to tell every- day stories and in the vernacular, arguments for a painting that always seems to interrogate itself and questions about its own condition. He is interested in painting as a “time line” and a learning place, subject to transmutations and only open to whoever wants to enter, his paintings that demand multiple views and several approaches.
Since 2010, Martinez feels compelled to paint large colour zones and then draw on them elements that can compose a story of suggestions and evocations. What he proposes is a materialization of something that previously did not exist before him putting it there. They are images of a strange and charming nature, that allow us to discover this other world which is parallel and close to ours.
This is how his painting translates into a highly complex work designed as a daily construction, based on the relationships of daily, meditated or haphazard events while extending over a surface of symbolic, humorous, literary or scientific references.

Submitted by Galeria El Museo