ARNDT Catalogue Manila

POW MARTINEZ
Irreverent, farcical, fantastic. Such can be said of the paintings of Pow Martinez, whose images
range from improbable, cartoonish scenes executed in rough strokes to heavy impastos that
near abstraction. He remains a believer of painting, of its endurance and inexhaustible potential.
Perhaps the genre now suffers from the ease of falling to predictability and commoditization,
which Martinez heavily guards his practice against. And so what he delivers are works that echo
the city he lives in: brash and unpredictable, never tame.
Consider his two pieces here. One depicts the contortions of a hermaphrodite-like figure
whose breasts and other extremities pull out like gum. The other mimics a familiar high point of
many suspense films: the dining scene. We bear witness to what is supposed to be a revolting
instance of cannibalism, but Martinez has caricatured it to an almost comic effect.
Such works reveal the irony that has become a leitmotif in the artist’s practice. Another is the
fight against safe, sentimental, and pleasure-seeking aesthetics. Yes, this might be bad art for
some, but perhaps rebellion is the point of the exercise. This hard-headedness and certain
distrust for the ruling convention may have rubbed off from living in a city that saw many
revolutions, and has long prized freedom of expression and individuality. Martinez confides he
likes the city’s dirt and grit, and he allows his paintings to be similarly so. He prefers to ransack
what is from the underground, the counterculture, the juvenile. Settling for what is mainstream
is just plain insulting.