Texas-based painter Leslie Martinez’s newest body of work builds upon their technique of applying pigment over a topography of repurposed detritus. Informed by a borderland ethos of ingenuity and practicality, Martinez incorporates the refuse of their studio practice into their work, fixing paint rags, studio clothing, canvas scraps, and paint chips (among other commonly-discarded materials) to the surfaces of their canvas prior to painting.

For the suite of paintings debuting at FOG 2025, Martinez applied a base coat of black over their initial application of recycled material. Like the Old Master grisaille technique of underpainting in monochrome to build tone and dimension, Martinez’s integration of a foundation layer lends subsequent applications of color a depth of hue. Painting over the aggregated layers of creased and wadded material in black unites the canvas’s topography in a manner reminiscent of Louise Nevelson’s all-black sculptures, which brought together disparate shapes using a single color. Martinez, however, modulates the visibility of their paintings’ construction with rich jewel tones and cloudy washes of white. They layer cohesion over difference with the result of a murky new terrain that enriches, deepens the interventions to its surface. Evidence of previous actions bleeds through; subtly, as in the crepuscular hues buttressed by a black foundation, and explicitly, like the quadrants of naked darkness pooled throughout the canvases.

Where Martinez’s previous works resembled shattered prisms shot through with light, works such as Ironclad Cloak (2024) obtain an almost bronzelike patina. In the large-scale Out of the Gap Where Darkness Echos, Mustangs Took Off Running (2023), created for their recent solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, marks a shift in Martinez’s process. Brief instances of vivid rainbows vie for the viewer’s eye amidst diffuse, mossy taupes and mauves while shards of crumpled textile coalesce into a loose horizon line buoyed by white streaks. A trickery of color and form signals flatness and dimension: Martinez simulates peaks and edges with intensely saturated yellows, oranges, and blues, working both with and against their jagged substrates.

The scale of fabric adhered to the faces shifts from painting to painting. In some, clumps of texture constellate a black field left bare from the underpainting stage. In others, Martinez intersperses patches of color with instances of texture; here, texture constitutes the picture plane, particularly in Subterranean Dreams (2024), comprising craters, ridges, and gulfs. Creases of cloth create a wrecked grid that spiderwebs across the surface of Calcified Veil (2024). Martinez describes the new form that surface takes as a “hide”—something animal, flayed—that has been pinched, stretched, and crumpled, even wounded.

Tourniquet (2024) explores—and explodes—the limits of a single color. Blue edges into teal, purple, and black, bruiselike. In the different and attenuated registers of hue, the painting resembles the late artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Black and Blue series (1976), in which the eponymous phrase is stamped in various eroded, smudged, and stacked configurations.  Says Martinez, “If I am limited to only blue for one painting, I want to stretch blue to its furthest, the base blue will be close to black and every multitude of blue will come in subtly to fight the homogenized limit of blue, to say: though there’s a limit, we will bring all the blues to the table. I want limitation and maximalism to happen on the same plane, for the multiplicity of blues to ward off the perception of the exclusion of other colors.”

At once uniform and contrarian, monochrome and kaleidoscopic, Martinez’s work exhorts us to hold polarities without reconciliation, acknowledging them in all their fraught beauty. The lively dynamics coursing through Martinez’s works function as a potent metaphor for building a life on the ruins of the past. The debris of past paintings becomes the material for new ones, hinting at a cyclical temporality, an ethos of salvage and promise.

– Audrey Min

Leslie Martinez (b. 1985, McAllen; lives and works in Dallas) received an MFA from Yale University (2018) and a BFA from The Cooper Union (2008). Solo exhibitions have been held at MoMA PS1, Queens (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023); and And Now, Dallas (2024, 2021, 2020). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (2024); Chapter NY (2024); Project Native Informant, London (2024); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2023); Lehmann Maupin, New York (2022); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2021); and The Latinx Project, New York University (2020). Martinez has participated in residencies at Denniston Hill, Woodbridge (2023); Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Dallas (2020); and Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2019). Martinez is a recipient of Latinx Arts Fellowship, Mellon Foundation (2022).

Martinez’s work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.