Ricardo Martínez de Hoyos
Mexican, 1918-2009
Desnudo (Nude), 1959
oil on canvas
35 1/2 x 59 1/4 in.
Promised Gift of Henry and Gloria Rubin
Undated photo of Martinez de Hoyos
COMMENTS
The massive, rounded volumes that characterize the work of Ricardo Martínez are based on pre-Columbian prototypes. The artist adapted this fundamental and symbolic vocabulary to create simple yet potent human forms which reference nature’s elemental forces of creation and destruction.
At the same time Martínez produces his work with a conscious knowledge of the reductive, essentializing tendencies of modernism. He simultaneously draws from it and reevaluates the accepted practices by which such artists as Englishman Henry Moore appropriated the volumetric forms of pre-Columbian sculpture.
SBMA Wall Text 2000
True to his own style, Ricardo Martinez was an artist who kept out of mainstream and artistic trends of the twentieth century, and although they took items he used in his work, he always retained an independence that is perhaps what gives a certain timelessness to his painting. His features resemble the Mexican School of Painting, the landscapes of Dr. Atl, the style of the great muralists, the stroke of Hispanic Soriano and monumentality. Always figurative, the audience is allowed into the world of Ricardo Martinez, in which the colors change at the last moment, details are added or removed and perspectives change.
The search for identity seems to be a constant in the painting of Ricardo Martinez, the monumentality of form, color palette and lack of background scenery give greater weight to the human form and became his signature style, seen throughout his artistic career. Large canvases confront the viewer with sober colors and geometric pyramidal structures, and serenity. Born in Mexico City, Ricardo Martinez was educated abroad. After returning to Mexico, Martinez studied law at the National University of Mexico but decided instead to become a painter. He was a self-taught artist who never received any formal training. He exhibited for the first time at the Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City in 1942 and has since enjoyed international recognition. After a period of still life painting his work evolved to a form of monumental non-narrarive figural painting. His style can be related to Rufino Tamayo.
http://www.cultura.df.gob.mx/