César Augusto Martínez (born 1944 in Laredo,ésarMartí Texas) is an artist, prominent in the field of Chicano art. While studying at what was then called Texas A&I College (later Texas A&I University), he became involved in the Chicano movement for civil rights. He subsequently befriended several of its leaders.
Martínez is best-known for his depictions of Chicano social types, which are referred to generically as 'batos" and "rucas." They are composite images, taken from vintage magazines, photographs, yearbook pictures, obituaries, and other sources. The artist has refined these images in paintings, drawings, and prints for many years.
Martínez also takes mythological subjects, South Texas folklore, and the Southwest landscape as subjects. He is also a photographer.
Martínez has been based in San Antonio, Texas since 1971.
Early life
Martínez was raised by his mother and her family in Laredo. His father died when he was an infant. He graduated from Martin High School in Laredo, Texas. Martínez received an Education Bachelor of Science Degree in All-Level Art Education from Texas A&I University, Kingsville, Texas, in 1968. Martínez, rather than expecting to be an artist, had hoped to become a bullfighter, and he has often utilized bullfighting imagery in his art.
Martínez was drafted into the army in 1969. After serving in California and Korea, he moved to San Antonio in 1971.
Artistic career
Before he began making images of people in 1978 (the batos and rucas noted above), Martínez experimented with color field painting. He joined the Con Safo art group in San Antonio in late 1972, and he resigned in November 1974. Martínez organized an exhibition under the name Los Quemados in June 1975 at the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio. He'd hoped that Los Quemados would become an informal association of artists without officers and guidelines, but, he says, "it never really gelled." One more Los Quemados exhibition was held in San Antonio at St. Philip's College on September 16, 1975.
When Martínez decided to make images of people, his greatest inspiration came from Salvador "El Queso" Torres' drawings of Mexican Americans, which Martínez saw in San Diego. He also acknowledges other California artists, including José Montoya and Rupert García.
He was also influenced by diverse sources. Martínez was captivated by Alberto Giacometti's solitary figures (which he saw in reproduction), and by his obsessive working practices. As a photographer, Martínez was impressed by Richard Avedon's "deadpan" frontal images, as well as by Fritz Scholder's colorful frontal images. Martínez also acknowledges several abstract artists: Mark Rothko, Jules Olitski, Philip Guston, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis. Martínez ultimately added a band of color at the top of his paintings of people.
Martínez's images of people are sourced from pictures from the 1940s and 1950s. The artist points out that during those periods Mexican Americans "were seen as rebellious because of their dress. Clothing became politicized because it was seen as an emblem of difference, so it relates to racism." Martínez uses accurate details, but he mixes them freely, sometimes combining details from different decades in his quest to, as he puts it, "make the characters 'realer than real.'" Since he is keenly aware of the distortions imposed by photography, Martínez makes distortions and fine calibrations of his own.
Martínez does not utilize living models because he cannot transport models from the past. His goals as an artist often sound paradoxical: "there might be a figure, but the essence is abstract, because it's a very elusive 'reality' that I am searching for. Too much perfection would kill it." He wants his works to be "powerful," to have "edge," to "ring true," but he says they are also ultimately "ambiguous." They must have "pictorial rhythm and balance," and he thinks generalized images are "more universal."
Speaking of his batos and rucas, Martínez says: "When my work succeeds, it projects Chicano culture from my--presumably our--perspective. I like to think that I am contributing to culture in general by affirming ours."