Mars 1

This RUN includes a 1 inch black wood frame with UV-glass, foam core backing and ready to hang hardware.

"Rotation was this new development in my work that I’ve been experimenting with. It’s this sort of merging and melting between the environment and the objects. There’s less separation between the background, the foreground, the sky and all the physical objects and geometric shapes. Kind of a feeling of this biological, mechanical weather. It’s a strange fuzzing or blurring of the distinctions between the physical, the ethereal, the mental and the biological.

I’m really trying to play with the seen and unseen. It’s some of these realities that we encounter on earth on a regular basis but somehow it feels like an alternate environment, an alien environment. It’s abstract in the sense that it’s hard to put into words. That’s the point I guess, exploring the grey areas of fleeting ideas or concepts that visually communicate to a dimension or depth that words may not do justice in attempting to explain. This is the direction the work that I have been doing lately is going, there is less distinction behind these elements. It’s a bit of macro and micro, all these different polarities combining." - Mars1

Mario Martinez (aka MARS-1) paints from a penetrating perspective of great depth. Viewers are drawn into his imaginative compositions, overflowing with colorful geometric and organic shapes, layered to form unique patterns and textures.

The artist signature style of vast, abstracted, quasi-extraterrestrial looking landscapes feature imagery of surreal distortions, contained within spherically convex transparent bubbles. Skillfully combining optical color blending with perspective line work, his painting techniques result in very three-dimensional forms, which echo the anatomy of architecture, and microcosmic structures of biology.

Mars-1’s distinctly individual aesthetic is not easily compared to the vision of his contemporaries or artists from past movements. These 3-D qualities transcend into his sculptural work, as well. His constantly evolving process continues to expand with each new series of work, seemingly beyond the reaches of even his own awareness.

Themes explored range from very scientific to more esoteric phenomena. From theoretical physics, metamorphosis and collective consciousness, to ufology and examining possibilities of otherworldly principles, the relative link between physical and life sciences are applied throughout. Transitional energies, natural multiplicity, helixes and spontaneous biological occurrences all come together, forming imagery with hypotheses beyond the scope of modern technology.