José Jun Martínez’s mellifluous dance with the devils of abstraction make manifest a celebration yet challenge of our usual understanding of landscape. Under his watchful, intelligent eye, flora and fauna – the very DNA of myth and the bucolic – become a kind of chromatic musical notation, with each note of colour vibrating with the energy of presence, whilst simultaneously haunted by a heartfelt, inscrutable absence. Time, space and place are phrased with the gooey efflorescence of a peregrine palette, seemingly at odds with the often delectable, tender calligraphy of Martínez’s searching brush, articulating such chromatic abundance. So it is that a duality of means and meaning fuels the artist’s enterprise with the blessings and burdens of memory which, in turn, speak to the dynamo of becoming rather than to any fixity of being.

Martínez’s universe recalls vignettes of Puerto Rico’s rich and colourful landscape but always tinged with the shadows of want. For all their botanical insinuation, these shapes never quite crystallize into concrete renditions of the subtropical flora one finds in Puerto Rico. Colour – and thus form – is deliberately broken up by a surface punctuated with sporadic moments of emptiness; unblemished ground interrupting Martínez’s metamorphosis of colour into shape into subject. These moments serving to heighten both the agitation of a physical time and space – felt and remembered – whilst also nurturing a disentanglement of forms, lending the painted surface the brusque staccato of a medieval tapestry, where action and protagonist are isolated on barren unthreaded ground to amplify the thrust of their significance to the tale the tapestry tells.