ENRIQUE MARTINEZ - "Ballet de los Muertos"
ENRIQUE MARTINEZ, Titled “Ballet de los Muertos”, Gouache and colored pencil on Paper. 11×14.
Enrique Martinez is an artist with a limitless imagination. His sense of wonder before the follies of mankind (and alienkind as well) literally knows no bounds. Moreover, as a phenomenally gifted draftsman and painter, he has the all-too-rare ability to materialize the phantasmatic fears, confusions, obsessions, and contradictions of our contemporary world. It is a universe in which all apparent victories are Pyrrhic. Lust and aggression culminate in a state of anxious melancholy rather than one of satisfaction and release.
Martinez weaves together an improbable cast of heroes, villains, aliens, common folk, grotesque giant mutants, malignant polyps that defy precise categorization, and other sundry composite creatures that are drawn from a myriad of sources in both high art and popular culture. While a few of them subsist in an all-too solitary confinement, most pour out onto the page as if they had been jettisoned from a Surreal floodgate. Martinez follows a path cleared by exceptionally singular artistic personalities. His sensibilities parallel those of R. Crumb. His penchant for creating hybrid monsters recalls Hieronymus Bosch. Martinez utilizes imagery from José Guadalupe Posada and Day of the Dead, and he also mixes fine art and pop and consumer culture like Enrique Chagoya. Born and raised on the border town of El Paso, TX. Enrique is currently living and working in San Antonio, TX