By Carolina A. Miranda

Walk into Roberts & Tilton gallery in Culver City and you will stumble into a murder scene. A man lies dead in a bathtub. His wild-eyed assailant stands behind him, knife in hand, ready to strike again in case the deed is not done. Another figure reaches toward the murderer, futilely trying to put a stop to the death that has just transpired.

The ghastly scene is a sculptural installation by Los Angeles artist Daniel Joseph Martinez that riffs on one of the most famous paintings in Western history: Jacques-Louis David’s late 18th century masterpiece “The Death of Marat,” which depicts the bloody assassination of the French revolutionary thinker Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub.

By Sharon Mizota

In a whirlwind of an exhibition at Roberts & Tilton, Daniel Joseph Martinez confirms his reputation as a brilliant mad philosopher. Inspired by the medieval “ship of fools,” in which the mentally ill were housed on wandering vessels, Martinez performed his own ritual unmooring, obsessively riding the buses of L.A. to observe the passengers.   

The result is a roomful of paintings in the style of the city’s colorful, vernacular signage, inscribed with Martinez’s observations and declarations. These are interspersed with collages of small, intimate Polaroids. They’re billed as self-portraits but are actually ambiguous close-ups of what could be body parts or excrement or perhaps decaying food. In the center of this maelstrom is a flotilla of uprooted bonsai trees, symbols of death, certainly, but also the remains of lives subjected to extremes of confinement and control. In an adjacent room are companion photographs of storefronts on which Martinez wrote his thoughts as graffiti.

By Holly Myers

Few artists working in Los Angeles today have been as consistently adamant in their politics as Daniel Joseph Martinez. From his famous contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white” — a work whose edge has yet to dull in 20 years of near-constant citation — to his recent trek along the 800-mile length of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Martinez’s work is scored with outrage and the particular brand of analytical fascination that outrage tends to engender.

Less often discussed, though equally significant, is the curious nature of the artist’s poetics: how elusive and strange his sculptures, photographs and text works can be, how beautiful and sad, particularly in recent years.

By Jonathan Maseng

Daniel Joseph Martinez has a question, or, rather, he wants you to have one. Well-known as one of the art world’s favorite provocateurs, the Los Angeles native and resident has brought his unique brand of art-as-conversation-piece to Culver City’s Roberts & Tilton Gallery for his first L.A. gallery exhibition in a decade, “I Am a Verb.” But why is Martinez, a non-Jewish artist, getting coverage in the Jewish Journal?  Well that’s simple, really; one of the works he made for the show is a series of photos of a hunchbacked, masked man with the Shema tattooed on his chest, along with a Muslim prayer inscribed in Arabic on one arm and a Catholic prayer in Latin on the other.