Gradients of colors pulsate across Leslie Martinez’s textured canvases, The Glimmer of an Arc Bending Back and Through a Pulse (2022) and A Wedge of Light Roots to Split the Ice Above the Current (2022), sublimely blending a celestial palette that appears sourced from the horizon. Pops of bright colors swirl and dance, touching the twisted tucks, lifts, and folded textures of the artist’s surfaces. Their use of color and materiality is a signature part of their style that speaks to the power of abstraction as a form of radical imagination and world-building. Using a range of hand-mixed paints, they play with thickness, transparency, and variegation as a visual embodiment of the emotions and sensational power that color holds. Their surfaces, produced from a cache of cast-off materials, such as shirts, rags, and pieces of failed attempts for other works, relates to their practice of a no-waste ethos and resourcefulness that holds the possibility for a transformative state of being. This resourcefulness is an inherent and embodied knowledge for individuals, frequently those in the borderlands, who live in precarious situations but make do and amplify the materials at hand, transforming them into new creative and uncanny realities. Martinez enacts this wisdom through a scope of painting techniques that recall the pooling stains of Helen Frankenthaler or Anselm Kiefer’s layering of ash and clay. Through their unique painting techniques and building up of materials, their canvases emulate a body or skin restructured and recombined into organic compositional shapes of radiating lines and swirls. 

Martinez’s work is heavily influenced by borderland existence. With ancestral ties to the Rio Grande Valley, they frequently navigated a checkpoint on many road trips to and from Dallas and the South Texas-Mexico border. Their encounters in this borderland space guided their interests in considering how racist and xenophobic perceptions of belonging and exclusion relate to the structures of queerness and transness in terms of the required negotiations and coding necessary for survival. Additional influences include the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz, whose theory of queerness offers itself a state of potentiality and an unpromised horizon yet to be reached. Their abstract paintings are a blueprint for the possibilities of queer imagination that would construct a liberatory future where individuals can exist as their whole selves, without any societal or legal restrictions placed upon their bodies. Through their paintings, they envision how bodies can safely navigate, evade, and move openly amongst various lands and across strict binaries of identity, as if the textured surfaces and range of colors offer codes and techniques for how to camouflage, imitate, or be hyper-visible as a strategy for safety and a way to exist. 

Artist texts by Marissa Del Toro