Wassily Kandinsky,

the founder of abstraction, encouraged for a non-objective art that would not simply characterize the world but instead will turn inside the mind to express personal experiences. Having learnt music before painting, the Russian painter sought to transmit the unmediated power of sound to the creation of an emotional visually imaginary. His expression ‘Each color lives by its mysterious life’ constitutes one of the essential strategies of his personal trail in painting. Furthermore, this was a fundamental part to the perception of the art experience, closer to the spiritual than to the intellectual engagement.

Comparable is the experience proposed by Gaspar Martinez in his Industrial Expressionism series. Employing charcoal and oil paint into raw canvases, by physical movements that the artist executes creating an abstract pictorial universe that allows color and form to live by their own secrecy. Furthermore, as if to expand the sense of surrender of the drive in the process of painting, he incorporates mistakes as possible points of departure of further visual figures. The evolution of his industrial abstract metaphors is therefore determined by chance and through an unconscious reliance of the energy contained in the physical motion and failure. The result is a collective of refined planes and lines sketched in primary colors, bordered by gestural charcoal draw paths that suggest geometric forms. The communication of these elements with the raw canvas extracts a meditative space where calligraphic drawing is disrupted by furtive geometries that emits their radiance. Most of the elements placed under tension by Martinez are presented unpretentiously and directly, erratically, like a temporary impulse depicted without

formality, and just as “untreated” as the background on which his movements disclose. Avoiding the predetermined compositional enterprise that generally rules the act of painting, the artist lets his body become the principal channel for these automatic industrial abstract paintings, where the images are produced as in an incidental exquisite corpse. Everything emerges as if in a raw state of the whole range of promises it offers; the free play of color as geometric shapes, line as trace, and form as symbols with the power of simplicity. By his Industrial Expressionism series Martinez is clearly pursuing the achievements of modernism since everything remains on the initial level of interpretation underwriting his preliminary geometric forms.

Marina H. Blanco.