In Harbinger, the artist’s second solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Leslie Martinez presents a body of work that marks a transitional shift. Through formal experimentations introducing new techniques, Martinez demonstrates how abstraction can register the conditions of life under intensifying systemic surveillance, influence, and control. Perception, affect, and attention become not only expressive but become almost architectural. Choices of color, material, gestures of reconstruction and mark-making, direct the viewers' visual experience the way algorithms, surveillance technology, and social media guide collective perception. Harbinger announces not only a new approach to Martinez’s painting style but also aims to herald a new future that is as ominous as it is hopeful.

In works like Pawns in the Scheme, poles seem to emerge from within the surface, across the visual plane, forming skeletal frameworks that create both structure and void. In works like Tone and Temperament as well as Soul Shaping Pain, found reflective objects, including convex mirror-like elements, introduce moments of distorted self-recognition. These surfaces see without being seen, returning the viewer’s image altered, warped, or displaced. They are accompanied by an increased angularity as well as large apertures that cut directly into the canvas. These openings collapse distinctions between surface and depth, interior and exterior, allowing light to pass through the work at different angles, altering the experience in real time as the viewer moves.

The resulting paintings are dynamic, contingent objects. Color shifts with angle and illumination and is used to harden or dissolve edges depending on proximity. The turbulent illusionism seen in these works becomes its own apparatus of perception. The manipulation of vision through contrast, reflection, and chromatic interference echoes the ways our own ideological “surfaces” are continually shaped, nudged, and recalibrated by political and market-driven messaging. As has long been the case with Martinez’ work, these paintings are not displays of fragmentation. They are constructions born of the materials, residues, and pressures of an increasingly deconstructed and dematerialized world. Everything is put together. The emphasis is on reformulation, regeneration, and the labor of finding coherence while living under constraint.

While Harbinger presents Martinez looking toward the external world and the present conditions of millions, its key questions are nevertheless rooted in lived experience. Growing up in South Texas along the U.S.–Mexico border, systems of surveillance are not abstract or exceptional but a normalized part of daily life. This early familiarity with being watched has shaped Martinez’s understanding of surveillance as a psychological atmosphere rather than a discrete event. Nevertheless, these works are not bound to autobiography but look outward, recognizing these conditions as increasingly shared across contemporary life. They propose a structure for sensory experience that emulates how algorithmic systems of control feed and organize attention and behavior. Silence, opacity, camouflage, and shadow emerge not as withdrawal but as tactics. The goal is to preserve interiority and agency within environments designed for exposure and extraction.

—William Hernandez Luege

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). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at MoMA PS1, Queens (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023); and Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (2024); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2023); 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.