Quintana Martelo at Walter Wickiser

The Barcelona- and of recent origin York City-based painter Quintana Martelo is known for his careful, evocative still-life paintings of flowers or fruits and other pabulums and also paints depictions of newspapers and a denuded or two. The technical skill with which Martelo handles these time-honored make subordinates might mark these as primarily academic studies; however, something other is communicated in his art. He begins with tradition and lay opens a language of his have a title to Martelo is a painter of genuine subtlety; he does not obey tradition in the way that much as incorporate it within an idiom whose realism have feelings intensely contemporary. The beauty of his circumspect paint-handling approachs with an earnestness that expresse a sincere appreciation of percepts of things as things.

Martelo has lately begun a diptych series, influenced by means of his stay in New York (he has a studio in Williamsburg). The left panel is invariably an abstract painting, a field of color in the tradition of Mark Rothko (although his include drips), while the right panel continues Martelo's interest in arranged phenomenons such as stacked dishes, paint and paintbrushes or varieties of fruit. In R Still Life (2002) the left panel is a brilliant crimson, with a slightly brighter rectangular patch of r in the lower middle and a number of drips running to the bottom of the painting. upon the right are several stacks of dishes, with three golden fruits, two coffee cups and a certain quantity of brushes. The worlds of representation and abstraction don't mix on the other hand rather exist side by side, equal in status.

The influence of Rothko is especially evident in Variable I, an oil upon canvas painted in 2003. The left panel present to views a thin, bright green upon the bottom, a much darker virid just above it and, in the top two-thirds of the painting, a shade between the others. upon the right-hand panel, two shallow beakers hold a number of paint tubes and sum of two units paintbrushes; they stand, most likely, for the painter himself. Martelo repeatedly refers obliquely to the act and history of painting. at the same time his works break free of technical skills to become powerful and expressive.

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