Daniel Joseph Martinez
I am a verb. I traded the future of humans for a caramel frappuccino, there will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined is Daniel Joseph Martinez’ first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in 10 years. The French writer and philosopher Paul Virilio was once famously quoted as saying, "War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there," meaning that all legitimate thoughts or ideas are either born from, or somehow intercepted by chaos, and that the impulse toward destruction is as much, if not more, a part of the creative process as is affection or love. Similarly, Martinez derives meaning from the living world in much the same manner, codifying the often disquieting visual lexicon by which we map out our lives, often turning those culturally determined roadmaps completely upside down. Rather than ascribe meaning to an image or idea, Martinez utilizes the physical body as its own sociological testing ground, at once mutated, mutilated and broken. However, these mutations are not harbingers of a darker more sinister future, but visual amplifications of human responsibility in understanding what might be possible once we move beyond our own biology. The social future possesses its own viable "body" that transcends its physicality just as Martinez' photographs of hunchbacks propose a strange asymmetry and ultimately transform beyond the "monstrous" pushing deeper still into the social fabric of everyday modern culture.