José Carlos Martinat Lima, Peru, b. 1974

Overview
José Carlos Martinat

"In art, it is up to us as artists to reflect what is happening at the moment and to point out certain issues. We have to be a good and totally unbiased reflection."

- José Carlos Martinat

 
Martinat explores political, economic, and social aspects, generally associated with their contexts. He creates his work in the same place where it will be exhibited, generating a tangible exchange with the environment, and often uses the street as a mold, copying elements that interest him.
Works
Biography
José Carlos Martinat
José Carlos Martinat  (Lima, 1974) works mixing mechanics, electronics, programming, and sculpture. His life as a visual artist is as eclectic as his training: he studied photography, graphic design, art, and technology. In his projects, he copies, appropriates, and reinterprets images part of the public space. His work comes from life itself: "I always try to work on things that already exist". 
 
The artist reinvents his surroundings. With different techniques, some disclosed while others are not, he copies monuments, statues, paintings, writings from the streets where he will make his presentations. Aluminum and resin are two elements that allow him to trace. Through this process, he moves from the public sphere to the private sphere, which takes elements of everyday life and relocates them within the art system. 
 
"Ejercicios Superficiales" (Superficial Exercises), is the title of the series of works that appropriate paintings from walls, graffiti-covered windowpanes taken from buildings, and three-dimensional frottages of public monuments. He meticulously transposes these elements in this supposed superficiality, taking them out of context, highlighting messages, popular struggles, and power disputes.
 
Often, these interventions are made without authorization. In Buenos Aires, for example, such interventions provoked the rage of the other artists. Perhaps it is not by chance that, for subsequent projects, he has worked with materials whose authorship was more difficult to identify. With an irreverent logic, against the spirit of the times, Martinat chooses an immoral gesture to reveal new meanings.
Exhibitions
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