Farces and fractures of a medieval world

Acore irony looms heavy in visual artist Pow Martinez’s irreverent, crudely imagined paintings. In the sprawling diptych from 2020 titled “Subterranean City,” Martinez devises a wasteland of vicious forces, a fray of danger in the midst of climate catastrophe. A border patrol agent holds his ground as hands sprout from beneath a black void. And yet one striking image imprints itself immediately and most memorably—a naked man, lounging carelessly on the side with an emptied wine glass, watching everything unfold. 

“Subterranean City” captures what makes Martinez’s paintings and sketches so compelling. In his art, Martinez seizes the mundane and the pathetic as they are brought into alerting contrast to the apocalyptic and violent. His latest show at MO_Space in Taguig City, titled “Look But Don’t Touch, Touch But Don’t Taste, Taste But Don’t Swallow,” furthers this exploration. Though his vivid and whimsical use of colors remains intact, Martinez leans ever deeper into character studies of the comically broken, set in a strange world that hybridizes the medieval and modern.

A brick castle spews smoke as a black dog observes the impending wreckage, smoke rising in a sky painted in serene waves of light green and blue. The tableau “Dog in Flood” is a study in misdirection. Our attention, much like how we see the subject in “Subterranean City,” is caught in a moment of tension, absorbing crisis and beauty in the same breath.

Martinez, throughout the exhibition, is skilled at depicting these moments with a prankster’s wit and cunning. The piece called “Clandestine Operation” best elucidates this vision, where we see someone dressed as a ghost participates in a talent show, perhaps doing spoken word poetry and failing miserably. A disappointed guest sits by the sidelines, nursing a beer. The judge smokes a cigarette, watching the ghost intently. There’s a heartening quality to these paintings: one understands the farce of it all, yet we seem called nonetheless to empathize with the ghost-poet onstage. His humiliation is humanizing inside the logic of Martinez’s world. 

Elsewhere, Martinez is just plain funny. The title “Power Lunch” might signal a corporate worker scarfing down a salad, but we get instead an apathetic figure outside a bar smoking yet another cigarette. “Be Right or Die Bad” features a floating head of some mystic figure, maybe a kind of god, and a set of characters rushing to a castle, trying to escape a set of fingers that just materialized out of the sky. For Martinez, humor acts as a channel with the capacity to bring out our deepest, darkest impulses. 

The cartoonish quality to Martinez’s paintings remind me of the scrappy drawings found in zines. The quality of Martinez’s attention to figure and form is homespun, charismatic, and brings out his characters’ experience of madness and modernity. At the heart of these paintings is a wandering spirit of a nomad, someone trying to carve out a space where our conflicting desires—for the old and new, the holy and material— converge. 

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Pow Martinez’s “Look But Don’t Touch, Touch But Don’t Taste, Taste But Don’t Swallow” concluded at MO_Space Sept. 8.