Dr Emma Sullivan on ‘Practice Makes Purrfect’

Aloof, and beautifully inscrutable, cats have been described as ‘infinitely interpretable texts’ (Hearne, 1982). Hugely popular as memes, even the classic subject of viral popular culture, it’s only fitting that they should feature in Martinez’s work, an artist so engaged with that culture. Mauro C. Martinez exploits the cat meme as a spent force – like the pun, it’s exhausted through overuse. But both puns and memes defy the usual economics of use, with exhaustion being so richly productive for both forms; and it’s an essentially comic mechanism – as Alenka Zupančič points out, ‘comedy is eminently preoccupied with failed finitude’ (2007, p.56). Leaping and tumbling, the cat’s shadow (and sometimes the cat itself) unsettles each image of the Practice Makes Purrfect series; disruptive in its lack of meaning but still modulated into the painting’s visual logic (the blurring of distance, for example); an elegant form of shitposting.

Practice Makes Purrfect is far from being purely philosophical or theoretical, however, engaged as it is in themes of corporeality and play. We might usefully situate these new pieces in response to the themes of Martinez’s previous work, the Nest series, which riffs on gaming setups submitted to the subreddit thread, r/RateMySetUp. For both series, the significance of the body is key. The Nest images are very internal, oppressive, often packed with detritus, and largely devoid of figures. The presence of each gamer – actual or implied – is static: physical existence shelved in favour of the virtual one. Indeed, Martinez argues for the images as testimony to ‘a suspended or defeated masculinity’ or a ‘masculinity in limbo’. The new series serves as a clear reaction – the paintings represent another site of play but with the patterning reversed: figures are central, and the only apparatus is the racquet, which, rather than the black box of gaming equipment, is a tool which is immediately legible even to the uninitiated. And rather than the inert physical presence implied by the Nest series, these athletic bodies move powerfully and confidently through space – a space that is rendered larger by the slight porousness of the colour wash. While the gamer body is invisible, disavowed, the body of the celebrity athlete is hyper-visible and cherished, even fetishized, for its inarguable embodied expertise. And tennis players are perhaps unique culturally in terms of their singular visual dominance – starkly alone in their epic confrontations. The epic battles of the gamer, meanwhile, remain hidden, and easy to dismiss as militarized, escapist entertainment (the other aspect of gaming – ‘as collaborative, constructive, experimental’ tends to be less noted (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009, p.228). Both sites of play have barriers: tennis is marked by an enduring sense of cultural elitism, and remains largely white, while gaming is still a mostly male preserve. 

If the two are different sides of the same coin in an era of intense corporeal doubt and anxiety – the shadow side of the gamer with the disavowed body – and the inflated glamour of the celebrity athlete – the burnished, auratic body, there’s also a continuity in terms of ‘flow’: that feeling of immersion, and presence, of being ‘in the zone’. It’s a state of being that is clearly connected to the painter’s own experience – and the series’ title gestures, albeit jokingly, to this shared commitment of practice, and profound concentration. 

But while the venerated athlete’s body is central to Practice Makes Purrfect, it is also intriguingly dislodged; just one element among many. The properties of the tennis milieu are richly symbolic in terms of the issues raised above (holders of heroic status and embodied expertise) but also rich in terms of formal opportunities. The great sweeps of colour, from cool pastels (Image 8) to the hot intensity of terracotta (Image 4), for instance, and the dynamism of the white lines bisecting those colours, which create the field anew in each image. The lines create the boundaries for each figure – the field for their action (just as the edges of the painter’s canvas define the visual field), and it’s almost unnerving when we come across an image without lines, the figure unbound and unanchored in space (Images 15 and 16). There’s also the unruly interplay between the shadows: the tug between the conventional interest of the vertical plane and the more obscure action on the horizontal. Even skin colour seems more like tonal experimentation than studied realism.  And while Martinez doesn’t seek to deny the celebrity of the individual player, he dials down too vivid a likeness as a way of preventing the dominance of that one aspect, and ensuring the even distribution of attention. This calibration of the visual field is, after all, what painting excels at. 

And what of the cat? Obviously not an element that naturally emerges from the tennis context, instead, deliberately, and comically, incongruous with and disruptive of that context. With the cat, Martinez embeds the shallow and the meaningless within a medium that is traditionally associated with depth and meaning. Digital culture is thus folded into the context of oil painting – but the tension remains: does the process serve to elevate the meme or to diminish the painting?