PORTRAITS IN THE WORK OF RICARDO MARTÍNEZ

What is a portrait? The most traditional definition of this art genre is that it is an effigy, that is to say, a faithful image of a person presented through different techniques and artistic materials. However, in one of the most emblematic works on the subject, theoreticians Galienne and Pierre Francastel, (1) warn that there was a reformulating of the genre based on avant-garde experiences, such as impressionism, cubism, fauvism and abstract art, among others. The different concepts and experiments performed in this revolutionary art context resulted in a wider and newer notion of the genre, which went, from being a faithful image of a person, to the recreation of some of the subject’s physical features or “signs” as perceived by another human being, in this case the artist. Thus, the image of the person portrayed is based on the other’s vision, which is subjective, and is therefore a reconstructed image. Throughout the development of modern and contemporary painting, the definition of portrait has been reformed, transformed and adapted. In a portrait one knows and recognises the subject. (2) The role of the spectator is essential, since his or her subjective perception intervenes in the re-creation of the work, in the same way as the artist’s in its initial creation. In a portrait a series of processes come together, such as the artist’s subjectivity, his or her vision of the subject and his or her artistic ideas, as well as the recognition of the image and its re-creation in the spectator’s eyes.

Ricardo Martínez's work in the field of figurative painting is well known; during his first creative period he covered a great variety of subjects, such as landscapes, popular culture images and characters, mothers and fathers with their children, just to mention a few, before he chose to represent the human figure, something he developed until the end of his life. The portraits registered to date were performed during the first period of his work, between the forties and fifties of the 20th Century. The Ricardo Martínez Foundation has registered 16 portraits and has knowledge of a seventeenth, which has unfortunately been impossible to trace.

(1) Galienne y Pierre Francastel, El retrato (España: Ediciones Cátedra, 1978) 9.

(2) Francastel, El retrato, 10.

The techniques are different: four of them are in pencil on paper, four in sanguine or red chalk on paper and nine in oil on canvas. (3)

A careful look at these works allows us to perceive some of the main features of the artist's work in the first period of his production: his knowledge of the painting tradition, the observation of the works by contemporary artists and the inclusion and re-interpretation of some of their features in his own creation. (4) Martine'z portraits display a thorough knowledge of the traditional media of the genre, which is evident in the use of a neutral background or a landscape, as well as in the use of front facing or three-quarter view. These tools blend with the influence of artists belong to the Contemporáneos literary and artistic group like Julio Castellanos, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano and other avant-garde artists, such as Giorgio de Chirico (Italian artist born in Greece, 1888-1978), whose works were admired and spread by the group. It is well known that Martínez was an admirer of De Chirico and was well acquainted with the production of the members of Contemporáneos.

The elements mentioned above can be observed in the portraits Ricardo Martínez made both of his wife Zarina Lacy (figs. 2 y 3) and of his parents, whom he portrayed on several occasions. (5) (figs. 4 y 5) Among these is the diptych under the title “Double portrait” (1942) (fig. 6), in which he portrayed his parents, each one of them holding something which defines them: Néstor Martínez is holding music notes and Elena de Hoyos a Bible. The traditional elements of the genre are evident in this piece, with the subjects in front of a landscape that serves as background. The representation of landscapes in portraits became popular in the 15th Century in places such as Ferrara, Venice and Florence, the latter where portrait painting achieved its highest originality around 1480. (6) The idea behind this was that a person was not complete if deprived of the elements that formed his or her everyday life, and landscape proved to be a natural framework within which the subject moved and performed everyday activities. The landscape in the diptych is interesting because it appears in other works of the same period, so it is likely that it represents places known by the artist and his family. In this way the artist not only provided further information about his subjects through the objects in their hands, but also a context to their everyday activities. The father’s eyes are black and almond shaped in the style of Julio Castellanos (1905-1947), who used to paint his subjects with such features. In this piece we can observe the combination of the plastic experiments of the author with elements he observed in other artists and his subjective perception of persons close to him. The subjects are presented by the artist as he perceives them, their physical features and those attributes that define them (the notes and Bible) relate eloquently with the pictorial resources, and one artistic element in this early period, which he will develop later, is already apparent: the creation of volume through the use of light.

Two individual portraits of the artist’s parents, “In memory of my father” (1944) (fig. 7) and “Portrait of my mother” (1945) (fig. 8), seem to sustain a dialogue: the former is a posthumous tribute to Néstor Martínez, while in the latter, Elena de Hoyos is portrayed most likely in widow’s weeds. The former is an example of the knowledge Ricardo Martínez had of the work of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1896-1971), whose influence is clear in the elongated, female figures clad in tunic-like rebozos, which appear in the second and third levels of the composition. Rodríguez Lozano often represented such figures in his work from 1940. The portrait displays a deep knowledge of the plastic language of Giorgio de Chirico who, as mentioned earlier, was an important influence in the works of Ricardo Martínez. De Chirico was the founder of metaphysical painting, whose main features are solitary, melancholy and enigmatic spaces with deep shadows and different vanishing points, where the architectural proportions are larger in relation with the human figure. All these features can be perceived in the background of the portrait.