Bitten by the demon of painting from his earliest childhood, Fabrice Martinez has never let go of his brushes since. Self-taught and passionate, he made a passage to the Faculty of Fine Arts of Aix-en-Provence, but his favourite school remained the one of the street: he rediscovered street art in the heart of the 2000s and fully committed himself to this artistic path.
His works on canvas explore the imagination of planetary icons that have survived through time while preserving their aura of magic and glamour. His predilection goes to the art of portraiture, which he practices with a mixture of purity and expressionism: his strokes and colours concentrate on the essential to release full emotions. But this marked stylization is associated with a delicate care given to the nuances and the material. By affixing compresses, coupled with a work of painting with a knife, he gives his canvases effects of relief, drape, wear: a carnal dimension that is not unlike that of a cracked wall that could be caressed at will.
Claiming cross-influences of street and pop art (Keith Haring, Banksy, Warhol...) or figures of inventiveness and mastery such as Dali or Matisse, Fabrice Martinez conceives painting as a machine to travel in time, in search of the sensations vanished from his childhood. His gallery of faces transports us into a fantasized time of carelessness, lightness and joy. A time, too, when the great figures of popular culture were not as sanitized as they are today, when one assumed one’s face and character.
Fabrice Martinez’s works, borrowed from an elegant vintage nostalgia, give new life to memories, to impressions buried in our memories or our imaginations.
Born in 1972, he lives and works in Corsica.
