Ricardo Martinez
(Mexican/Texas, 1918-2009)

"Peones", 1954

oil on canvas
signed and dated lower left.
Framed.
59" x 36", framed 66" x 43"

Provenance: Purchased in February 1955 from Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City, Mexico; Collection of Samuel Ellis and Valerie Sellors Dunnam, Austin, Texas; thence by descent.

Literature: This work will be included in the Fundacion Ricardo Martinez catalogue raisonne, # FRM000721.

We kindly thank the Fundacion Ricardo Martinez for confirming the painting in the Galeria de Arte Mexicano records/archives.

Notes: Ricardo Martinez, a quiet man in life, spoke volumes in his art. A pivotal figure in 20th century Mexican art, his work is a unique blend of magical realism and costumbrista painting that explores the mundane and the spiritual in Mexican culture through the human body: monumental and suspended or folded inward in repetition, Martinez transfigures the terrestrial world into physical manifestations of the celestial one that recall the cosmos and ethos of the nation and its Pre-colonial past.

Martinez was born into a large, artistically gifted family with sixteen children in Mexico City. At the age of nine, his family moved to San Antonio, Texas, exposing the young Martinez children to the English language and literature. With the onset of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Mexico City, and Martinez began drawing and painting to help the family. His innate talent drew the attention of his brothers Jorge- an architect, and Olivero, a sculptor- who taught him the basics of painting and enlisted his assistance with drawings for the "Monument to the Revolution". Following Martinez's graduation from High School in 1938, he enrolled to study law at the Autonomous University of Mexico, but left within a month to pursue art at the Academy of San Carlos- an even shorter lived venture that lasted but a day. In 1940 Martinez set up a studio in his parents' home and began "teaching himself" through Mexican and European art books and the English manual, The Materials of the Artist Max Doerner. Martinez's early paintings-experiments in the compositional technicality of still-lifes and landscapes-merged elements of works by the Mexican Muralists, Picasso and Surrealism. While his subjects recall Muralist's depictions of peasants and Mexico's pre-colonial history, the spatial dislocation and tonal, monochromatic colors elucidate compositions more akin to Surrealism.

This unique painting, of two brick layers, proletarian pawns of industry, represents some of Martinez's strongest costumbrista-influenced oeuvre. Produced between 1954-1958, these works celebrate the everyday life of the peasantry and proletariat. In Martinez's evocation of the "forgotten laborer" through large, imposing figures that recall the monumentality of Pre-Columbian statuary and the social realism of the Mexican Muralists, he evokes the spirits of the past. The repetition of carrying bricks as an adobe “borro”, one of the most menial forms of manual labor is aggrandized. The massive figures, frozen in perfect juxtaposition with skin the color of the earthen bricks they carry, blend into the nebulous background of the same hue, recalling the Pre-Columbian builders of the ancient pyramids and ballcourts.

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