José Carlos Martinat

Lima, Perú, 1974

            José Carlos Martinat works mixing mechanics, electronics, programming, and sculpture. His life as a visual artist is as eclectic as his training: he studied photography, graphic design, art, and technology. In his projects, he copies, appropriates, and reinterprets images part of the public space. His work comes from life itself: "I always try to work on things that already exist". He explores political, economic, and social aspects, generally associated with their contexts. Martinat creates his work in the same place where it will be exhibited, generating a tangible exchange with the environment. He often uses the street as a mold, copying elements that interest him.

            He is a multifaceted art worker, and his works are usually eccentric, colorful, often monumental, with the participation of the public and also of guests asked to intervene in the work exhibited. The artist reinvents his surroundings. With different techniques, some disclosed while others are not, he copies monuments, statues, paintings, writings from the streets where he will make his presentations. Aluminum and resin are two elements that allow him to trace: "by placing the sheets on a torso, statue, monument and molding it on the selected object, the result is superficial sculptures, thin and delicate, but still with the serious face that comes from the original work".

            From this work mechanics, he moves from the public sphere to the private sphere, which takes elements of everyday life and relocates them within the art system. This is "Ejercicios Superficiales" (Superficial Exercises), the title of this series of works that appropriate street art: paintings removed from walls, graffiti-covered windowpanes taken from buildings, and three-dimensional frottages of public monuments. He meticulously transposes these elements in this supposed superficiality, taking them out of context, highlighting messages, popular struggles, and power disputes.

            Often, these interventions are made without authorization. In Buenos Aires, for example, such interventions provoked the rage of the other artists. Perhaps it is not by chance that, for subsequent projects, he has worked with materials whose authorship was more difficult to identify. With an irreverent logic, against the spirit of the times, Martinat chooses an immoral gesture to reveal new meanings.