Interview
We interview Mauro C. Martinez on the eve of the opening of his new museum presentation in Syracuse, NY, discovering the power of cursed images and the necessity of keeping an open mind.
Congratulations on your new exhibition LANscapes opening at the Syracuse University Art Museum, could you tell us a little bit about the show?
So I’m talking about gaming setups, not too dissimilar to my previous show Rate My Setup at Unit, but here one of the things we’re looking at specifically is the idea of infrastructure. So I have two images that we are making, one is an old LAN party image. You know LAN parties? In a garage, computers set up on desks? In the 90s, LAN parties were when people would come together and game. It looks very fun. Then the other is a much more modern image, with a kid gaming on a console, with the TV super high up and they’re sitting on a ladder to be level with the TV. It’s more precarious. It’s a then-and-now gaming comparison – you can draw your own conclusions.
In the middle of that, as we’re thinking about infrastructure, is a sculpture I’m calling The Internet. This would be the old Linksys router, an iconic router (out here at least) that everyone had in the early 2000s. It’s going to be holding, or more like cradling, the first ever WIFI hardware, which is basically a little card you plug in. So a mother and child image, a tender embrace. A dead thing carried by a new thing, almost lamenting, but it shows the evolution of the internet.
You have a deep relationship with the internet, even summing up your practice as “Painting the Internet”. How does that work?
Ok so one of the things that I’ve often tried to do is – and maybe it’s not the best idea – but I’ve always tried to sum up my entire practice in one sentence. I started with “Documenting the end of the world”, because I felt like my series Cursed Images was a diagnostic finger pointing at our preoccupation with absurdity and excess and irony. However, I think when you have a tagline looming over you, it makes you feel like you have to keep doing that one thing. But I genuinely don’t feel that pessimistic about life, so I switched over to something that was a bit more broad, so along came “Painting the Internet”.
I think in some ways, I’m very nuanced when I think about art, and in some ways I’m very black and white. So my personal mission has been, throughout the course of my practice, to go through the Rolodex of everything I believe in and find all the black and white things, bring them out and say, ok let’s look at this and see if that’s right. Because one thing that I truly believe is that if you’re a dogmatic thinker, it shows up in your work. So I try to consciously open up.
So where did the idea of archiving the internet and working with what we might call Internet Culture come from?
My mom’s a nurse, and I’ve got other family members in the medical field, so I grew up around a lot of images from medical dictionaries, full of every condition known to man, classified and documented, and I would flip through all these images when I was younger.
Later I began to think about dehumanisation in medicine, and how that’s also a central characteristic of modern life. Foucault said a great thing, “You have to dehumanise the person for the sake of medical advancement,” meaning to move forward as a species you have to be detached and objective.
I saw a similar diagnostic relevance in my Cursed Images series. They contain many elements of excess, for example people wearing loafers but they’re actual loaves of bread, and it’s a very first world thing to be able to dip into absurdity with resources that are extremely scarce in other places.
Then there’s also the idea inherent in Cursed Images that they don’t subscribe to the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why. They are antithetical to conventional images, which often seek to answer those things, or provide a narrative for you to resolve some of the Ws. Cursed Images leave you with more questions than answers.
So what makes these images cursed is that they operate in the wrong way?
They defy convention and work in the same way as memes, as they’re not only just antithetical to the way images work but also to the way oil paintings work. Memes are very fast, ephemeral, they come and go. Oil paintings tend to stick with you, they last, they’re archival. Digital images can be too, but again it’s entirely dependent on the precarious context of the internet existing and the electricity being on, you know? They could be gone any second.
How did this interest in memes and non-conventional images develop your practice?
My first show with Unit, Big Mood, represented my preferred way of working, which is prototypically. I love making one-offs, things that don’t have to be a series, that begin and end themselves. That was one of the reasons why I aligned myself with painting memes as it became a vehicle for me to paint in a very wide range of techniques and styles, because they take such different forms. Sometimes it’s cartoons, sometimes just text. So it was a great chance for me to explore as much as possible technically while still having some sort of cohesive thing going on.
And how did that first show come about?
It was pretty wild. This was in 2020, so the COVID lockdown happened on 15th March and a couple of days before that I would always hear the same thing, “Out of an abundance of caution we’re cancelling this.” I remember, that was the phrase. I had a show in Dallas, and on the day of the show I got a message from the gallery, “Hey, out of an abundance of caution we’re cancelling this” which sucked. But literally that day, I got a DM from you guys at Unit, and it was crazy that as everything was falling apart this great journey was happening. It was really beautiful.
So we had Big Mood in 2020, and then The Last Man in 2022 where I shifted a bit from memes and cursed images to gaming setups. I’ve been trying to look at internet culture from just about every angle that I could, so not just the images that are produced but also what the lives look like of the people that produce them. That was where The Last Man came in, using Nietzsche’s parable as a cautionary tale of over-reliance on one thing. I had made a couple of sculptures, one of them was called Zarathustra, and it was a MacBook charger in the shape of a serpent, right in front of the main painting, so it’s a warning and a welcome at the same time. And then after that was Rate my Setup. And that was looking at the physical state of gaming setups themselves and sort of the precariousness of them, and then using that as a vehicle to talk about the lengths that we will go to be and stay online.
We can trace a clear development then, from Big Mood to your most recent show with Unit, Practice Makes Purrfect, which was the first time you had made a series into a full exhibition. It involved a response to the serialisation of art in the market based on what is commercially successful, visualised through the sporting metaphor of a perfected tennis serve. So how do you reconcile that quest for perfection in your own practice?
I think maybe the deeper question is, is perfection the most optimal outcome? Is that what you want?
I’m guessing you don’t?
I don’t know. I’m not trying to create a sermon where I have an idea and I’m communicating it for the sake of convincing other people. I’m just publicly asking questions to myself, and trying to figure it out. Sometimes I think if I were to nail down a really good abstract technique and get to a really good place, maybe I would be happy to bang those out for the rest of my life. But then I think, “hey, I want to go sit by the river and paint too – is that my style?” Not everybody has to see everything that you do. And up to this point, I can’t really point to a lot of examples of artists that have dealt with this in their work.
It’s one of those things where I have to figure it out for my own soul, you know. I have to get to the bottom of it. I’m like that unhinged detective where he’s got the wall with the red threads. I’m trying to figure it out, that’s what I feel like when I’m painting.
Do you feel like you’re figuring it out?
I feel at peace in the process. And I think that’s the best I can ask for.
So what happens now?
I think we’re in a resting period right now. Because obviously you have to give the internet time to reload more images, you know?
The internet is running out?
It’s running out guys. I’m completing it!
