The Fantastic Art of Mars-1
Cartographer of Inner Space
You might have seen his alien landscapes on the covers and in the pages of such magazines as Heads and Juxtapoz (or maybe not, does anyone read print magazines anymore, I see so many new magazines appearing on the shelves every time I pop into the magazine shop, they look cool and all, but does anyone even buy them? How do they survive?) The landscapes of alien worlds and dimensions with their weird vegetation and buildings, like an upgraded version of some magickal universe that
Dr. Strange would usually end up flying through while battling some evil other-dimensional alien God. Are these paintings of other planets, other dimensions, or some inner world? Or maybe some future of ours, so far in the future that the singularity to them is like the Lascaux cave paintings are to us?
Mars-1 (aka Mario Martinez) is the San Francisco based visionary artist who is responsible for these creations, whose
describes his art as, “an ongoing and evolving attempt at externalizing the visualization /exploration of fuzzy logic and Ontology.” While still relatively young, he fits squarely into the ancient lineages of visionary artists, having more to do with the worlds of archaic shamanism and ritual magicians than art world objects as contentless and vapid as the networks of commercial transactions they are enmeshed in.
While most of his work is done with traditional paint and canvas, in true pomo fashion his visions have also been expressed in such non-traditional mediums as skateboard decks and designer toys.
The toys are generally manifestations of the beings that populate some of his paintings, looking like members of an alien society with its norms and relations, their strange sensoriums developed to survive in their otherworldly surroundings, beings that have merged with their environments, like we have in our interconnected cybernetic world, vegetation growing on the creatures, affectless faces, sober, sedated or maybe just mentally peering into unheard of dimensions …
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Very cool stuff indeed!
*iza