Several years ago, on the streets of Santa Fe during Santa Fe Indian Market, a group of teens stopped at the booth of Robert Martinez and one of them stood in front of a painting and mentioned it looked like “Predator vision.” It took a second for the eavesdropper to connect the dots, but the teen was referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 action film Predator. The movie’s monster, a game hunter from outer space, saw the world, and his unfortunate prey, in a sort of mesmerizing thermal vision that took color and heat and mashed them together in a dazzling display of light.
Hatter, airbrushed acrylic and oil, 40 x 30"
This comparison was a silly—and, it should be noted, somewhat accurate—observation to make, but it revealed a deeper truth of Martinez’s hyper-saturated hues: the artist can paint in an otherworldly spectrum of color and light, and the closest comparison that holds any water is one of science fiction.
The Wyoming-based Martinez (Northern Arapaho) will be bringing those intense colors to a new solo exhibition at the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming. The Art of Robert Martinez, which opens July 10 and runs through September 5, will feature more than 30 works, many of them new. The bulk of the show will be major new oils, but the exhibition will also feature his graphite works.
“I love having fun with the color,” Martinez says.
Hatter II, airbrushed acrylic and oil, 30 x 40"
“I always choose the color based on the specific image…it has to work for what I’m painting. For instance, an Arapaho person might best be suited for the blue tones or the sunset colors. We’re often called the Blue Sky People or the Blue Bead People, so I like to focus on those blues. But then I also like to draw in some purples, or maybe the opposite of that in the color scheme. I’ll dissect the color and test it. Color is everything.”
Two Feathers, airbrushed acrylic and oil on panel with raised accents, 20 x 16"
Martinez says he was inspired early by some of Edward S. Curtis’ photographs of Native Americans from the early 1900s. “He was using sepia and black and white, and yet the subjects were saying, ‘We’re still here and we’re vibrant.’ I saw those and I knew
I wanted to paint to get people’s attention, to give them those in-your-face colors,” he adds. “But I also wanted to take my work in a new direction. I didn’t want to paint the stylized West. We don’t live in teepees or ride horses everywhere. We have cell phones, we live in the modern world. I wanted to poke holes in what people had in their minds about us.”
7G, graphite and acrylic, 11 x 14"
Works that poke plenty of holes include 7G, which shows a Native American man holding a cell phone to his face as if scrolling deep into an Instagram feed, and then Be Cool, showing a figure in a modern jacket and gold necklaces. He wears an “NDN” ring and poses as if he’s in the liner notes of a Run-DMC album, circa 1986.
“One of my goals as a Native artist is to broaden the viewership of Native artwork, especially in places where we’re frequently pigeonholed,” Martinez says. “We have to be seen in different light.”
July 10-September 5, 2021
The Art of Robert Martinez
The Brinton Museum, 239 Brinton Road,
Big Horn, WY, 82833, (307) 672-3173,
www.thebrintonmuseum.org
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