Dallas-based Leslie Martinez’s first New York solo show, The Fault of Formation at MoMA PS1, addresses political binaries and cultural survival.
We—humans and the world—are in a constant state of change. In times of uncertainty and unrest, we are often unsure where to begin and where to end. We rely on our patterns and reflect our cultural beliefs in a volleying shift between independence and interdependence.
Dallas-based artist Leslie Martinez moves in the middle, in medias res, with bold color, residual materials, and poetic verve. The large and multi-faceted paintings highlight the personal and the political landscape. The work even takes on an earthly dimension, cratered with dust and detritus.
Martinez, who was born in McAllen, Texas, describes their latest work as crushed chaos, an unrecognizable feeling that documents and translates the body to capture what it feels like to be left in a world.
The Fault of Formation is Martinez’s first New York solo show, and it’s on view at MoMA PS1. The exhibition, consisting of a series of paintings that involve a collage of materials including sawdust, mica powder, and iron silicate, is their largest body of work to date.
When asked about the exhibition title, Martinez, a 2022 recipient of the United States Latinx Art Forum’s Latinx Artist Fellowship, shares that the title considers the tectonic shifts on the Earth’s surface as a metaphor for the political, polarizing, broken, divided, and shifting.
The way Martinez constructs their pieces changes with each body of work. They mostly work with smaller chunks of material that are combined out of a conglomerate of materials that have been collected over time. Sometimes those materials accumulate over months or years to take on their own character as they come together to compose the first parts of the canvas paintings.
The exhibition involves substantial shifting, both structurally and metaphorically. Even the titles of each painting alter the viewer’s awareness. For instance, the large painting entering a MoMA PS1 gallery is called Out of the Gap Where Darkness Echoes, Mustangs Take Off Running (2023).
According to Martinez, the titles typically reference something in the world—something metaphorical, scientific, or that overlays with a formal aspect of the work. They come from an observation that happens while working.
A title could come from what it feels like to brush a certain color onto a certain surface. It intuitively comes from something looser in language. It comes from the work and from memory. Invisibility and sustainability are binding tenets in Martinez’s work.
The idea of labor, the long gesture, and the remainder of a story may connect to Martinez’s “no waste ethos” practice. They are created with discarded materials for ecological and cultural reasons. Martinez, whose conditioned to not waste anything, says the physical quality of the work initially began to transform the notion of surface and paint, but the artist soon shifted their thoughts on what is possible with paint and substrate.
Later, their process evolved toward sustainability—accumulating, cutting, combining. But, Martinez states it is also a hermetic and sympathetic process about materials not being left behind and having an understanding of the value and presence of material and its possibilities.
Embedded in Martinez’s material abstractions are their familial roots. The patterns on the canvas are historically connected to generational scarcity. There is a forced fearlessness of the unknown that thrives in Martinez’s work today.
When asked if their work is making patterns and connections that stretch over time, Martinez says they go into a labor trance where they feel like they are having communion with their past people and time.
Leslie Martinez: The Fault of Formation is on view at MoMA PS1 through April 8, 2024.
