We recently connected with Romulo Martinez and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Romulo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

In my artistic career of more than 15 years dedicated to art creation, I have had great opportunities to develop exhibition projects with works of installation nature for which I feel identified as a visual artist. Among them I remember my individual exhibition Consumables, held in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia, under the curatorial work of Jimmy Yanez, where I developed 6 large-scale proposals of various materiality and formality among them. This project meant a before and after in my career, as it provided me with new notions of interaction and intervention in the museum space, notions that I would continue to develop ever since and embodied in my most recent exhibition project entitled Looking for signs, with the curatorial work of Julie Shipp, a project that led me to add a personal and professional achievement.

With the invitation of the Collin College Art Gallery, Plano campus, I had the opportunity to develop an exhibition project in a professional space with the complete freedom to express myself as an artist, to place whatever I wanted on the immaculate walls of the enclosure. I developed 3 proposals of different dimensions, but in dialogue with each other, being Caught by color the work that welcomed the visitors with direct interventions on the wall with spray paint and hearts trapped and mounted on the pictorial flashes. Introducing this work from the emotionality of moods inside us to the exteriorization of these in the proposal Portrayed circumstances, a series of characters made on canvases of different dimensions representing those introspective moments around a dilemma, a crossroads in a decision making, a moment portrayed in a decomposition. And ending the exhibition with Watching room, a proposal to approach my different moods and artistic production through a cluster of various works in small format with different applied techniques as a window to my journey and experimentations.

The creative freedom that an exhibition space of this type granted me increased my potential to express myself ambitiously, leaving my comfort zone. That is why I consider that Looking for signs has been my most recent major project carried out, with the satisfaction of having fulfilled my proposed goal from the first moment I was invited to exhibit and stepped on that empty room.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

It may be a cliché or a story often heard, but certainly my vocation for artistic creation has always been present since my childhood. As a child I used to spend my time drawing, sketching with colored pencils, with paint, modeling plasticine, to sum up, when you have an internal passion, it is difficult to let it go.

Due to family, social and personal circumstances, although I had never left artistic creation from a self-taught perspective, I had a period in which I did not consider living from the visual arts. But after having gone through a 4-year university career, studying Public Accounting, where I was a mediocre student and did not identify myself with it, a year after graduating, I decided to study for a degree in plastic arts to satisfy the inner emptiness of education in what really interested me and what still interests me.

The decision to study what I am passionate about is one of the most important decisions I have made in my life, a transparent decision that I made for myself, without taking into account what my family and friends might think. By studying something that satisfies you in every way, you end up doing a good job in your area. I was a very dedicated student that allowed me to make my way in the artistic and cultural life of my hometown of Maracaibo through participation in collective exhibitions, art salons and individual exhibitions.

I entered the world of visual arts by vocation, which was transformed into dedication and the total surrender of my passion towards making my works, which are characterized by the symbolic use of color as well as human and object representations within picturesque, funny and everyday contexts. I consider that my works are ambassadors of my person, they speak for me, they speak of my spirit, my view of the world, my way of seeing and interpreting everything around me. My works are my everything, my words, feelings, actions and gestures, each work is a fraction of my soul.

As a creator within my artistic practices, I believe it is important to place within your creations what differentiates you from others, for better or for worse, with good results or not, it is a risk that must be taken for that desire to do something different, something that identifies you in the eyes of others and differentiates you from the rest of the artists. I think that contemporary arts ask to question the work, the artistic practice itself, with the intention of wanting to see something distinctive, unexpected, something additional to what you can contribute. And this has led me to go through various formalities and techniques but always in harmony with my personal research around color and its symbolic and emotional links, with which I became known as a mixed media artist, where material and technical diversity talk to empower each other.

One of the things that fills me with great satisfaction and pride is seeing the positive impact that my proposals have on people, where the sincerity of some nice words, facial expressions or authentic gestures, speak to me and indicate that what I do produces emotion, reflection and joy. This strengthens my position in thinking that the works I make are not for me, but for the viewer.

I give myself 100% in each work I do, I spare no effort to carry out my artistic proposals, from the smallest to the most ambitious in dimensions, without distinction of support or formality. I give myself with all my mental, physical, conceptual and technical capacities to see materialized what my mind in communion with my heart wishes to express.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The engine that drives my life is the desire to express myself, expose my thoughts and internal emotions plastically. Having studied and continuing to do so every day through the production and artistic work motivates me.

I think that an artist is one who contributes and nurtures, with his aesthetic/formal approaches, new conceptions or ways of seeing art, this is my goal: to try to contribute and nurture the world of arts. It is a commitment to myself, that as long as I have the mental, physical and material capacity to be able to carry out works, I will do so. And as long as I can, I will deliver all that is in me, with my knowledge and skills to create art with its messages and content that contribute to the aesthetic delight of viewers and society through visual contemplation.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The human being is culture, culture is history and identity, it is humanity. I consider that all artistic manifestations are a very important item within the society, and in the absence of them, there is an absence of ourselves, with our past and present envisioning the future, since the arts provide us with a mirror to see ourselves, analyze and understand ourselves as human beings. I believe that every society committed to scientific development, education, sports, the prosperity of industrialization, among others, must also commit to the development of artistic expressions, and give them the same level of importance as others.

Culture and art are comparable to the items that society builds. If a sector, a neighborhood has schools, hospitals, recreational and sports centers, there must also be a cultural museum space where the arts can be investigated, expressed and contemplated.

What should society do to support artists and creators in the best way and promote a good and prosperous development of artistic manifestations? It is to create cultural spaces that encourage artistic creation and research, spaces that are managed professionally and that encourage the professionalization of crafts, and that these cultural centers keep an open mind towards the appreciation of all artistic expressions, to avoid the vice of standardizing the aesthetics of what could be considered art based on personal criteria by their governing or management board. Avoid this vice among others, so that works of various conceptual/formal natures are not left without the possibility of being experienced, visualized and criticized.

The flag is: celebrate the diversity of the visual arts, from the simplest to the most complex, from the most academic to the most experimental, from the most understandable to the most incomprehensible.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.romulomartinez.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/_romulomartinez
• Facebook: facebook.com/romulomartinezart