Mars-1

Mario Martinez is Mars-1, and Mars-1 runs deep. A painter of mysteries and a believer in improbabilities, Mars is, as Mario is, a free-floating cultural enigma who brings a rare kind of revelatory uncertainty wherever he lands. He reminds me of my favorite drugs, which, by perfect chance, are his favorites as well. An epiphany of befuddlement, with the supreme clarity of derangement, he manufactures eureka moments that offer no answers but invoke a greater wisdom in the irrational sum of their vexing questions. Mars-1’s art is hard work; it takes him many months to make one painting, and the rest of us years to figure out what they’re about. Best as we can tell, they are careful examinations of that which may or may not exist somewhere just beyond cognition, explorations of those dreamscapes that unfold along the distant peripheries of our reality, deniable potentialities meant for those who play the long shot, hallucinations rendered as actualities. 

 

For all the finesse, this sleight of hand behind the curtain of Oz, that blind spot of consensus reality where fictions constitute another kind of truth, Mars-1 inhabits hypothetical spaces that are remarkable for seeming so familiar while being so utterly alien. That’s a tricky modus operandi, and like the most significant exponents of Visionary Art, seeing is believing only if you are open to such suggestions. The highly rational mind assures that this stuff is nonsense, so it is by virtue of fantastic virtuosity that Mario Martinez can break down these rational filters, that he can make his otherworldly apparitions palpably present. Psychic projections, borne along the philosophical stream of aesthetics, his art is convincing because it is so damn enticing, the way a singular imagination can inspire a collective consideration, a story told so well its fictions become facts. Mars-1 creates within the realm of the senses, and as a sensory seduction, it is as ecstatic and intoxicating as fine art can get.

Not a prolific artist by any measure, nor one much motivated by the ambitions of career that drive so many, Martinez is something like a consistent contradiction within the contemporary, an oddity we might call a futuristic anachronism or a free radical undermining the body politic of representational art. As long as we accept that art today is an extension of the commodity market, then it’s not so surprising that many people might not know who Mars-1 is now; but for anyone who has been paying attention to the cultural margins over the past quarter century, he is absolutely central. For all his history, deeply etched into the alternative visual history that defines Juxtapoz, as well as the committed collectors and avid fans who continue to sustain his practice, he’s the kind of trickster medicine man whose spell is best cast in secret. You don’t have to know about Mars-1; he’s too esoteric for most, inhabiting an oblique orbit that doesn’t register on the average cultural radar, but once you spot his art, it’s damn hard to forget, and then suddenly worth tracking.. 

 

Conjuring is a recasting of the ineffable in the domain of the visible - and that’s pretty much what Mars-1 does with his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. This transference of form and materiality is never a solitary alchemy; it is a collective apparition fathomed between the conjurer and their audience, closer to the hysteria of a mass hallucination than a private show. This too presents a difficult measure of Mario’s consummate craft, how he unveils the uncanny with a certain delicacy, allowing the spectacular to appear without the ballyhoo of spectacle, keeping its vast metaphysical design shrouded so that only the frame of his gaze shines like the Cheshire Cat as an unorthodox wisdom and guidance within the exquisite panic of Wonderland, unreality suspended outside the song and dance of Pop Surrealism in an optical soup of quiet  contemplation. Visionary art, and in the Jux universe, lets suggest a pantheon ranging from psychedelic greats like Mati Klarwein and Alex Grey to true transgressors like H.R. Giger and Joe Coleman. Attention vies outside the normal playing field of visual culture by often relying on a deft level of showmanship. Magic words need to be loudly incanted before we can see the anatomy of desire in half, just as smoke and mirrors are requisite if we hope to see ourselves in the delirious other. Mars-1 has no such theatrics, he’s comfortable dancing with the unknown so long as he doesn’t have to know its name, his mindscapes all sung softly in a wishful whisper, that delicious hush of delight when we stop streaming pleasure and look within. 

For all the discretion and poetry of his pictures, Mars-1 is ultimately quite accessible and democratic in his spiritually tinged cosmology. He swims in the unruly tides of what is theoretically plausible, somewhat heedless to the gravitational pull of magical thinking. Is it all kind of abstract and esoteric? Sure, but he doesn’t wink to the prophetic graces or perennial wisdoms; he keeps his visionary vistas grounded within the comprehensible narrative of genres, specifically science fiction and fantasy. Without all the pretense by which nerds become intolerable fools, Mars’s fabulations never rally for disciples to convert so much as create unthinkable worlds so convincing they invite one to think about them. His art plays with the mythical with just enough whimsy that it can be mind-bending without bending the will of the observer. Rejecting the didactic as he eschews explanation, Mars-1 casts his rapturous imagistic riddles in the spirit of popular culture, supplying a wild inventory of totally out-there vistas as a kind of ultra-trippy picturesque. If there’s a definite streak of fantasy illustration, sci fi speculation, or mondo mysticism in his art, it’s all mixed into a post-modern mélange of youth vernaculars with echoes of tattoo, skate, graffiti and psychedelic culture. 

 

Mars-1 has been forged in a subcultural crucible of such hybrid intensity it can hardly come as  much of a surprise that his work is wickedly mutant, so unlike most of what we see these days, as it echoes a distant and different sound misfit in spectral harmony with those more idiosyncratic voices that resound along the depths of what we once called underground art. He carries his own light, held close, in those fecund shadows of cultural resistance, a long thought away from the mainstream. Those of us on the East Coast probably first came across his work through the solo shows he did at the seminal Jonathan Levine Gallery, though no doubt just as many would know him through his exhibitions with Los Angeles’ stalwart provocateur Billy Shire; but through all the twists and turns thrown up by scenes like Low Brow, Pop Surrealism, Underground Comics, Street Art, and Graffiti over the past few decades, Mario has been in the room, part of the conversation yet always insistently an outlier. It’s a deeply personal history he carries, whether acknowledging how the graffiti collective The Barnstormers turned him on to the power of collaboration, talking about his collaborations with the likes of Ralph Steadman and Alex Grey, or helming his own vagabond crew of “San Francisco psychonauts'' called the Furtherrr Collective. 

 

The occasion to call Mars-1 and write about him for Juxtapoz is that he’s got some sort of big retrospective in the works early in 2025. As with many projects out of SF, the details are somewhat vague, but far as we can tell, it’s going to happen at The Fillmore West, the legendary venue where music promoter Bill Graham helped motivate and monetize the acid-drenched Sixties Psychedelic Rock scene, and that its organization/funding are the purview of perennial day-tripper Brian Chambers, one of the most committed collectors of Mars-1’s work whose shrine to psychedelic culture The Chambers Project in Grass Valley promotes the art of Mars-1 as well as other mind-bending visionaries like Roger Dean, Steadman and the estate of Rick Griffin. This survey, which will cover the past twenty-five or so years of Mars-1’s optical adventures, will presumably follow the artist’s journey from the character-based paintings of the 90s, rife with the cartoonish sensibilities of a comic-reading graffiti artist, through his increasingly disorienting and fantastic pictorial topographies, as well as his consciousness-altering sculptures, descendants of early artist toy projects now in bronze with exquisitely detailed focus on their abnormal architectures and anomalous anatomies. 

As varied as Martinez’s oeuvre may be, its entirety manifests an abiding oddity and wonderment, as if designed by the imaginations and hands of an alien species, somehow crafted directly out of a radically alternate reality. He’s one of those artists where, even when you know he made it, you still must wonder where the hell it really came from. For Mars-1 the art is somehow always about a sense of mystery. “My family had a sighting when I was a kid,” he explains. “Mom, dad, and grandma all saw it—something unidentified and unusual, and I grew up with them telling this story.” For all of us who just cringe when people start talking about UFOs and alien visitations, there is something about Mario’s ongoing ufology that is less delusional and superstitious than dreamy and delirious. Of course, when you grow up with something, it becomes your reality, less a matter of the magical thinking at the base of belief than a sensitivity to this mental magic and an openness to other, atypical or bizarre, ways of believing. For Mars-1 this is the edge of unknowing, sharply honed yet perceptually blurry, a passage of trails that go far afield but always lead back to the self, what he describes as “the space we can tap into to find what is possible and what is not. “Expanding and contracting consciousness,” he tells us, “is an exercise. Brains have all these filters, and psychedelics help remove some of the filters.” Despite all our skepticisms, let’s just say that seeing is believing, and what Mars-1 sees is not just believable; it is alive, a biological, organic, oceanic, topographical otherness so compelling as to alter all who encounter it to the degree that we may not ever see things quite the same way.