CONFLICT (This or this?)
Artist Bio
Romulo Martinez is a Venezuelan artist residing in the Dallas, Texas, with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Zulia and a Master’s in Artistic Production, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.
His artwork is characterized by the symbolic use of color and human representations accompanied by everyday objects and natural elements within contexts of a humanistic, social and introspective nature, with touches of everyday life, playfulness and the picturesque, and is also distinguished by the application of various techniques and media such as drawing, painting, graphic arts, collage and installations.
In his professional career he has several academic awards and artistic recognitions, and 14 solo exhibitions in leading museums, cultural institutions and private galleries, including the most recent Shared Stories at the Latino Cultural Center – Dallas in September 2024. He has participated in more than 70 collective exhibitions, festivals and art salons, and his works have been exhibited in different cities of Venezuela individually or collectively, such as Maracaibo, Caracas, Valencia, Maracay, Barcelona, Trujillo and Ciudad Bolívar, and internationally in Bogotá-Colombia, Valencia-Spain, Aruba, City of Singapore-Singapore, Lima-Peru, and within the United States in Miami, Dallas, Frisco, Coppell, Denton, Plano and Fort Worth.
He served as Professor of Plastic Arts at the Department of Culture of the Aof Zulia between the years 2012-2015, and since 2018 he lives in Texas, where he continues to develop his work and new exhibition projects with a focus on self-discovery, personal journey and color as a story teller.
Artist Statement
As a person and artist, I have always had a strong interest in humanistic, social and introspective themes, which lead me to capture in my work, with documentary conceptions, both my own and others emotions with the intention that viewers can see themselves reflected in the work from the sensitivity and make them participants of the stories or dialogues represented, or, on the contrary let them nourish and give the work a new conceptual and narrative content.
I represent through bursts, auras and color, the emotions from a search for self-discovery in the various moods of emotionality and thoughts within picturesque, playful and surreal contexts, where human figures and, natural or everyday elements, in an allegorical and cartographic way seek to narrate a story. It is in this way that the series that defines my work Presences / essences was born, a work in which color plays a symbolic and conceptual role accompanying the representations to evoke feelings and sensations.
In my work I seek to express myself through experimentation with mixed media and various formalities between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, using different techniques with their materials such as collage, assembly and construction, in the company of painting, drawing and the graphic arts such as serigraphy, stencils and photography, leading me to create modular proposals in dialogue with each other, interventions in space or installations.
Because it has autobiographical nuances, my work is an introspective, therapeutic journey, where I seek to heal and reconcile the thoughts and memories in the historicity of my personal life, looking at the past through meditation and reflection to think about the present and visualize the future with the hope of being able to give myself and others certain statements that awaken enthusiasm and courage in their beings no matter the changes that life presents us.
Romulo Martinez