Scene VIII: José Jun Martínez, The Hymn of the Toads

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, January 2025

José Jun Martínez’s mellifluous dance with the devils of abstraction make manifest a celebration yet challenge of our usual understanding of landscape. Under his watchful, intelligent eye, flora and fauna – the very DNA of myth and the bucolic - become a kind of chromatic musical notation, with each note of colour vibrating with the energy of presence, whilst simultaneously haunted by a heartfelt, inscrutable absence. Time, space and place are phrased with the gooey efflorescence of a peregrine palette, seemingly at odds with the often delectable, tender calligraphy of Martínez’s searching brush, articulating such chromatic abundance. So it is that a duality of means and meaning fuels the artist’s enterprise with the blessings and burdens of memory which, in turn, speak to the dynamo of becoming rather than to any fixity of being.

The Hymn of the Toads is a new body of work that continues the artist’s impassioned dig into the alphabet, archaeology and geology of painting. His being a quest to unearth ways of melding - in paint – the oceans of then and now; the security and familiarity of place with the amoeba of inchoate space. A journey that illuminates both the viscera and vicissitudes of Nature, oft sung physically yet, at times, whispered like magical, ancient secrets. The result is a sequence of succulent and saturated, spirited yet sensitive abstract surfaces that evince the glorious earth, mud, and dirt of both Nature (as subject) and Painting (as practice), equally inspired by the art, poetry and lore of Martínez’s homeland, Puerto Rico.

José Jun Martínez, When midnight comes heavy with thoughts, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

Home is like a mirage. Seen from afar it wobbles in waves of refracted ambiguity, desperate for realisation; when close it disappears: its dreamy ambition replaced by slippery streams of experience impossible to get any distance on and therefore gain any emotional or intellectual purchase from. So it is that Martínez’s universe recalls vignettes of Puerto Rico’s rich and colourful landscape but always tinged with the shadows of want. When midnight comes heavy with thoughts (2025) offers up a sumptuous carpet of azure, lime and lilac tones, their shapes evoking petals, leaves or stamens as if fleetingly witnessed in a thicket of wilderness seen from a speeding car. Yet for all their botanical insinuation, these shapes never quite crystallize into concrete renditions of the subtropical flora one finds in Puerto Rico. Colour – and thus form – is deliberately broken up by a surface punctuated with sporadic moments of emptiness; unblemished ground interrupting Martínez’s metamorphosis of colour into shape into subject. These moments serving to heighten both the agitation of a physical time and space – felt and remembered - whilst also nurturing a disentanglement of forms, lending the painted surface the brusque staccato of a medieval tapestry, where action and protagonist are isolated on barren unthreaded ground to amplify the thrust of their significance to the tale the tapestry tells.

José Jun Martínez, With the heart pierced by stars, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

To find one’s place, it seems one must first abandon it. Martínez’s (re)discovery of his homeland (seen from afar in his current home of London) is achieved through a visual recollection that, like a favourite smell or a treasured piece of music, triggers memory in a more instinctual way. With the heart pierced by stars (2025) proposes a more abstract surface, with an architecture of dark, thrusting lines propping up the same blue, green and lavender hues visible in When midnight comes heavy with thoughts. Only the leaves of lush ferns, hurriedly zipping across the canvas, reveal themselves. Flower, plant, and tree are now subsumed into the vortex of Martínez’s eager brush, hop-scotching across the canvas so that the viewer is gifted but an augenblick of such flora. Colours and forms slide quickly into one another, only for them to collide with passages bereft of pigment, thus morphing between a sense of known and unknown; a contest that overrides any registration of botanical phenomena, yet which leaves the viewer feeling they are deep inside such terrain. Memory both charges and is charged by an emotional intensity that is, of course, motivated not by proximity but by distance. The artist’s displacement may leave him heavy of heart, as these titles suggest, yet these two luxuriant paintings teem with the vibrancy and light of a place so fondly remembered that the need for its physical description remains subservient to the emotional, umbilical power it engenders in both the artist and his viewer.

José Jun Martínez, That which is hidden, 2025, Oil on canvas, 150 x 250 cm (59 x 98 3/8 in)

Love and longing slowly weave their way through this body of work. An affection and pining for the warmth and surety of home, much as it is the desire for the fragmentation of a mosaic-like surface to assume the fecundity of a plumply painted ground. However, notions of love run deeper for Martínez, representing more than mere formal concerns of habit or habitat hanging in the air. That which is hidden (2025) presents a verdant, paradisaical stage upon which the drama of coupling unfolds. At centre left a tempest of sky-blue strokes reverberate in frenzied animation, their motion and commotion at odds with the pacific calm of the warm, colourful forest it discombobulates. The loosely rendered strokes seem to imply the union of two supine forms: their innate alienation from the environment they occupy amplified by the ethereal nature of their assumed anatomy. Whether these creatures are of the land or sea, real or imagined, even visibly there or not, the energy such union (even its attempt) created by this whirlwind of blues excites both the viewer and Martínez’s composition. Just as memories can be lost by the unconscious, inexorable emergence of another memory – be it id or ego driven – so too can the longing for such memory (and the love it promises) be interrupted by thoughts and desires that drift from and to elsewhere.

Such playful (yet dark) manipulation of layers of consciousness chimes neatly with the tenets of Surrealism and, in this specific body of work, with the art of Carlos Raquel Rivera and the poetry of Evaristo Ribera Chevremont, both of whom engaged with the mystical as they chose to adumbrate such mystery via the vernacular of Nature and its ineluctable plasticity. The entanglement of blues is here specifically inspired by one of Rivera’s greatest paintings – Paroxismo (1963) - depicting two calligraphic creatures that could be lizards, crocodiles or even dinosaurs. Their apparent synthesis offers several possible readings: one may be carrying the other; they may just be moving in unison. Perhaps they are engaged in an act of coupling? Again, their taxonomic status carries none of the weight that the physical act Rivera delineates does. Martínez even borrows the elongated licks of bright blue paint Rivera employs to conjure his potentially yoked creatures, their stretched, oleaginous forms offering both the act and the trails of consequence such a germinal performance ignites.

José Jun Martínez, Their swollen eyes on the infinite, 2025, Oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm (63 x 78 3/4 in)

If longing hides hidden in the chinks between loaded space and empty ground, then love, now, explodes across Martínez’s surface in cacophonous adagios of gesture and colour. More such sexual symbiosis informs the topography of Their swollen eyes on the infinite (2024) which brings us to the toads Martínez alludes to and which are inspired by Ribera Chevremont’s poem, The Hymn of the Toads. Two pools of colour – one pink, one blue – seem to energise a landscape of runny yellows and streaming blues that appear not unlike a meteorological map, with the pools perhaps mimicking the eyes of hurricanes. Yet the source for this composition lies in Ribera Chevremont’s wonderful poem: a modernist paean to a simple toad now elevated to seer of dimensions past, present and future. Each line of the poem begins with “the toads” and is followed by a statement of their behaviour, intent or capacity that, naturally, lie outside the ordinary orbit of faculties one associates with a mere toad. The toad – an inconsequential creature at the best of times – is now ennobled to the status of prophet: the poem ends, “the toads accompany the snore of humanity and are, in spite of everything, content; / the toads know that man exists, but they do not call to him … / The toads realize that something new has been born …” So it is that, here, Martínez’s toads take on the mystical, magical omniscience of a figure like the Taino goddess Guabancex who, in Puerto Rican mythology, is responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes, so that these huge hurricane eyes, devouring much of the pictorial space and acting as the kindling of its composition, ironically reflect the illustriousness of a common toad. The circle is completed when one learns that the artist has also employed images of copulating toads in arriving at this described ‘space’. The slick, mucilaginous pools of colour signifying not just the maelstrom of love and its longing but also a lubrication of lust, mixed with the sticky slime of our amphibian hero.

José Jun Martínez, Like the sun when it rises, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm (78 3/4 x 63 in)

Botany and bounty make great bedfellows in this body of work, much as lustre is licked by lust; much as light is touched by shadow; much as the innocuous can describe the sublime. Martínez’s paintings take us on a complex journey through several indices of power and meaning but ultimately these are paintings that are unapologetically painterly and it is the bounty of their making that ultimately leaves the viewer feeling so invigorated. Like the sun when it rises (2025) offers a gloriously lavish surface, sizzling in sunny yellows, bronzed greens, warm ochres and hot pinks, all rendered with breezy confidence. Of all the compositions in this Scene, this painting is the most undiluted in terms of its descriptive power and intent. Giant fronds of what look like palm leaves or huge ferns sway in a gentle breeze, their colour so deep, so variegated it almost alienates the subject, pushing it deeper into the terrain of both abstraction and Surrealism. However, as with all these paintings, Martínez cleverly purloins presence from pattern, achieving both sense and sensation from formal dislocation and chromatic disentanglement. Such heavy saturation is fundamentally explained by the painting’s title: the plant is made more colourful because of the rising sun’s beams of light that caress it. A sunrise that is further aped by the shape (and palette) of the ferns it makes stranger yet more beautiful because of their estrangement. Nature – like love – being the beast of its own making and the prisoner of its own yearning.

José Jun Martínez, Between the spectral and the pallid, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

The bounty of Nature may well be the propellor for much of Martínez’s foray into the forest of memories and desire he so powerfully intimates in this Scene. However, the more carnal, fleshy, leafy moments of these compositions are made more poetic and sophisticated by Martínez’s keen interest in fusing the physical with the mystical; a virtue of both Rivera’s art and Ribera Chevremont’s writing. Between the spectral and the pallid (2025) energetically reveals the contest and the synergy between forces both familiar and esoteric. Darting, exploratory strokes of the same sky blue previously employed to suggest mysterious, coupling creatures in That which is hidden clamber through thick, often impasto passages of sage and forest greens. Here this specific shade of blue itself signals Martínez’s design to marry the accountable with the inexplicable, yet he does so in a rather curious manner. The depth and density of the verdant green forest is both fractured yet repaired by this sequence of sinewy blue strokes, as if each mark, emanating from another space, stitches together the place in an arc as healing as it is confrontational. The forest is filled with a bounty of flora and fauna and yet, often, one enters the forest not looking for such natural phenomena but to find a space – a haven, even – where answers to the conundrums of life and love, of being here not there, can find you. One could easily suggest that our lives are tormented by the struggle of having to live between the polarities of being and becoming. Yet Martínez’s paintings show us just how easy, beautiful and necessary it is to embrace and to be both: to sing this glutinous, greasy, gorgeous hymn of the toads and learn from the materiality that song (and Martínez’s corresponding brushwork) places on the majesty of mystery and the matter of meaning we all so need and yet so desperately miss.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
16 January, 2025