Practice Makes Purrfect

Mauro C. Martinez’s latest exhibition with Unit London explores the parallels between an athlete’s training and the artistic practice. Focusing on images of tennis, Practice Makes Purrfect, employs the artist’s trademark dark sense of humour alongside a deep dive into ideas of competition and repetition. A transition from Martinez’s last solo exhibition, which contemplated virtual gaming, Practice Makes Purrfect looks to physical sport through the contained narrative of a tennis match. Enhanced by the lack of opponent and crowd, this body of work highlights individual competition, alluding to our sometimes-fraught relationships with ourselves. The shadow of a housecat takes the place of a tennis ball, a comedic reference to this darker side of competition. At the same time, however, Practice Makes Purrfect foregrounds resilience in the face of difficulty as each athlete challenges the prospect of intense competition head on with an ace serve. 

Each painting mimics the style of photography typically used for tennis matches. Emphasising enhanced shadows, stark lighting and the use of a bird’s eye perspective, Martinez pictures each athlete frozen in the middle of a crucial moment. Colour schemes are active and vibrant, mirroring the physical nature of the sport itself while contrasting the potential violence of the subject matter. In this sense, Martinez is perhaps more interested in the aesthetics of tennis photography than in the sport itself, as his palette contrasts his last two solo exhibitions, which centred on neutral interiors with little to no outside intervention. Martinez employs digital tools to enlarge and crop his compositions at will. The expanded fields of vision accentuate the lack of opponent and crowd, highlighting the intensity of the individual competition taking place. While each painting recalls the hyperrealism of sports photography, Martinez imbues each painting with reminders of the artist’s hand. Abstraction encroaches onto these artworks as the crisp and refined details of photography are blurred through the use of fluid and loose brushwork.

In addition to ideas of sport and competition, Practice Makes Purrfect is framed by Hannah Wohl’s Bound by Creativity, a sociological study of the contemporary art market and the artistic series. For Martinez, artistic practice has always been a refuge, but the realities of the larger art market can sometimes threaten the safety of this refuge. With this body of work, Martinez has chosen to return to a past series of artworks, a decision that could be seen as frustrating. Martinez has always defined his relationship to the artistic series as contentious. For him, a series of artworks that repeat the same theme can sometimes be limiting. However, Martinez also admits that he can be guilty of moving on too quickly, failing to sit with a subject long enough to explore its full potential. In Practice Makes Purrfect, the process of repetition becomes a way to delve deeper, to mine subject matters for more and to give them the continued attention that they perhaps previously deserved. As such, Practice Makes Purrfect becomes an experiment in discipline and iteration as Martinez returns to the past to learn something new.

Join us on the 9th January, 6-9pm, for a celebratory opening reception of Mauro C. Martinez’s solo exhibition.

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Mauro C. Martinez (b. 1986) is a Mexican-American visual artist. He graduated from Pasadena’s Art Centre College of Design in 2010 and since then he has exhibited internationally. In 2020 Mauro’s first solo exhibition with Unit London, titled Big Mood, took place in the Mayfair space. Since then the artist held a second solo exhibition in 2022, titled The Last Man, which was followed by a third solo exhibition in 2023, titled RateMySetup. Recent group exhibitions include the Unit London Takeover, Nassima Landau in Tel Aviv, Israel (2022); Sensitive Content, Unit London, London, UK (2022) and ART 021, Brownie Project, Shanghai, China (2021). His work is held in various prominent collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, USA. The artist currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.