Quintana Martelo at Walter Wickiser

The Barcelona- and New York City-based painter Quintana Martelo is known for his careful, evocative still-life paintings of flowers or fruits and other foods, and also paints depictions of newspapers and a nude or two. The technical skill with which Martelo handles these time-honored subjects might mark these as primarily academic studies; however, something else is communicated in his art. He begins with tradition and develops a language of his own. Martelo is a painter of genuine subtlety; he does not obey tradition so much as incorporate it within an idiom whose realism feels intensely contemporary. The beauty of his circumspect paint-handling comes with an earnestness that expresses a sincere appreciation of objects, of things as things.

Martelo has recently begun a diptych series, influenced by his stay in New York (he has a studio in Williamsburg). The left panel is invariably an abstract painting, a field of color in the tradition of Mark Rothko (although his include drips), while the right panel continues Martelo's interest in arranged objects such as stacked dishes, paint and paintbrushes or varieties of fruit. In Red Still Life (2002), the left panel is a brilliant crimson, with a slightly brighter rectangular patch of red in the lower middle and a number of drips running to the bottom of the painting. On the right are several stacks of dishes, with three yellow fruits, two coffee cups and some brushes. The worlds of representation and abstraction don't mix but rather exist side by side, equal in status.

The influence of Rothko is especially evident in Variable I, an oil on canvas painted in 2003. The left panel shows a thin, bright green on the bottom, a much darker green just above it and, in the top two-thirds of the painting, a shade between the others. On the right-hand panel, two shallow bowls hold a number of paint tubes and two paintbrushes; they stand, most likely, for the painter himself. Martelo often refers obliquely to the act and history of painting. Yet his works break free of technical skills to become powerful and expressive.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group