Silverlens is thrilled to announce Clunker, Pow Martinez's fifth solo exhibition at Silverlens. The exhibition will run from 3 November to 3 December 2022 at Silverlens Manila, 2263 Chino Roces Ave. Ext., Makati City.
Martinez's paintings belie their grotesque subject matter with indelibly beautiful surfaces and a wide-ranging, daring use of color. Mutants, monsters, demons, deviants, and freaks lurch, sit, and appear to transform amidst weirdly lit landscapes or disintegrating urban scenarios, or emerge from a painterly graffito mess, but, as his more abstracted works insist, Martinez's ability to render intriguing relationships between forms and surfaces ensure his works are endlessly compelling— an experience akin to a beautiful nightmare.
Pow Martinez describes his current process as "what a nature painter might do in a digital landscape." Clunker presents a collection of recent paintings featuring his now familiar solid-eyed, rubber band-lipped, and '80s era mullet-rocking characters. Mostly languishing by their lonesome, we see them while away the time either channel surfing or doom-scrolling, with bodies in strange contortions if not already melding with the furniture. Viewed in light of the prolonged lockdowns, these isolated figures, navigating the confines of the not-so-great indoors, become eerily familiar and may be our collective portraits.
Text by Gary-Ross Pastrana
2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension
Makati City
Manila, 1231
Philippines
www.silverlensgalleries.com
+63 2 88160044
+63 917 587 4011 (Fax)
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