Yasmina Martínez exhibits 'Sauvage' at the Casa de Saturninita

 

The multidisciplinary and self-taught artist Yasmina Martínez Rivero (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1975) is offering her latest pictorial work, Sauvage, at the Casa de Saturninita Art Center, in San Fernando de Maspalomas. 

 

The exhibition, inaugurated this Friday by the second deputy mayor, Elena Álamo, and the Councilor for Culture and Education, Esther Delgado, is made up of 41 works of different formats and can be enjoyed until November 3.

 

The exhibition serves a purpose and is a declaration of intentions. It reveals the creative potential of a still-budding artist who studied Administration and Finance, and that during the Covid pandemic she recovered the painterly spirit that she had shown in her childhood. She forced herself to paint and create each and every day of confinement. The result increased her passion for this mode of expression. Her perseverance and passion were decisive and the sum of it was the key to her current vocation.

 

In 'Wild', an expression she Frenchized to soften the beast, Yazmina works especially with acrylics, but also with India ink and watercolors. She does it on different supports and also boldly risks the fusion of different materials to generate reliefs in her works. The peculiar illustrative style of this artist runs through her dreams.

 

It is “a casual project,” she explains. A meditation, a custom that helps her purify and concentrate thoughts and energies, led her to visualize and paint birds, something she had never done before. First she was a parrot, and then birds, pelicans, flamingos, macaws, owls... and later also dogs, monkeys, tigers, flowers... "My art is characterized by a fun explosion of colors," she says. “In each work I express feelings and moods, always trying to ensure that the viewer can see and understand the different concepts and delve into my soul,” she says.

 

 

 

Curiously, these explosions of colors appear mostly in this project on dark backgrounds, many of them black, which further highlight the love she feels for painting (declaration of intentions) and reveal the genome of a figurative illustrator that permeates each of her paintings. . The colors of her canvases and her woods are here like the reverse of her personality, with a much more sober appearance. In her paintings her colors slide in a premeditated but also innate way, like the simple sweeping strokes of her brushes. The result is fantasy works where dream and reality merge. So are her firebirds, or her rock monkeys. And a secret about it: “they are recycled paintings.” Beneath the “cane-sucking” monkeys, as the painter calls them, there were human illustrations. “We all carry an animal inside us,” argues Yasmina Martínez. That's also why the title of her exhibition.

 

And another discreet secret about this sample. Among the paintings hanging in the Casa de Saturninita there appears a nod to 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', by the Dutchman Johannes Vermeer, which is actually a portrait of a dog that was given to him and that has stolen his heart. “She has fallen in love with me. She has driven me crazy,” she confesses.