Screen Shot 2019 04 02 At 5 10 59 Pm

Rick Martinez

As a HIV+ gay Latin man, I want to accurately portray my perceptions of the world, my family, my upbringing, New York, and to leave a personal, public diary of my existence: a legacy of images.

Self Portrait
The First Ten
The First Ten
1

The paintings chosen for this exhibition emerge from deeply-embedded autobiographical themes. The self-portrait is the artist as observer. New Pieta is an expression of the tragedy of AIDS set against a background of religious institutions that chose to ignore the tragedy and focus on “sin” in human sexuality. The landscape is my attempt to capture the natural world which (as a child growing up in New York City) I was denied. I see landscapes much as Virginia Woolf conceived of in The Waves: “I take the trees, the clouds, to be witness of my complete integration.”