Artist Interview Form
José Jun Martinez
Interviewer: Hamish Strudwick
José Jun Martinez (B.1992) is a London-based Puerto Rican artist whose polychrome and thickly impastoed landscapes evoke the natural environment of his native island. He received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (2015) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London, where he was awarded the Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize (2024). His recent solo exhibitions include “The Hymn of the Toads” (Matt Carey-Williams, London, 2025) and “Interludio del Viento” (Galería Leyendecker, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2025) and an upcoming show in Ordovas, London, scheduled for September 2025.
You have said in the past that your fellow students once joked that you were the ‘last impressionist’. Your practice has taken you out of doors, out of the studio, to directly interact with the tightly composed landscapes you paint. Recently, however, you have integrated using photographs and projections to realise your works. How did this integration develop, and in what ways has it changed the way you project your impression of the world?
That anecdote you refer to is more than 10 years old. I remember it fondly because it was a sign that my friends were aware of my almost stubborn commitment to that specific aspect of my practice. That commitment persists today, although it has opened itself to include more ways of approaching the subject of my paintings. Two main events affected my stubbornness and made me include printed and projected photographs and videos in my process. The first was Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, causing devastation in the land and making it unsafe to paint outside and also emotionally difficult (even morally questionable) to continue business as usual. The other was the COVID-19 pandemic, which was when we were deprived of the outside world for a few months. Little did I know that those moments prepared me for a third moment: my relocation to London. I am still painting about Puerto Rico, the place where I immersed myself for many years so deeply that I won that nickname you mentioned.
When we (the viewer’s eye) are placed amongst the dense flora, the sensation is overwhelming. Our relation to nature changes in this close proximity, and what we imagine as calm, tamed, and immutable suddenly becomes dynamic, unrestrained, and in a state of almost constant flux. Previously, you talked about the importance of observing cycles in nature, and you have certainly found a way to make us aware of the voracity of plants and flowers from their own perspective. I want to ask about your thoughts on the relativity of time, our presuppositions about how nature changes through it, and how important it is to you to experience this directly.
I particularly thought about this when painting at a flower farm owned by a family I am friends with. The matriarch was planting Azucena flower bulbs and started talking about the time of flowers and how you can’t rush them. All that while I was painting next to her. She also said, “We are all here fleeing from something; what are you fleeing from?”. She used to be a shrink years ago, and I guess I was in a therapy session without knowing. Anyway, immersion in nature and painting is a kind of confrontational retreat. I prefer not to see it as an act of escapism but as a way to be liberated from the mere surface of the world and to try to get to know it in a more profound sense. In that sense, it is a mystical approach, a simultaneous discipline of action and contemplation. Time here is a language to make verbal and mathematical sense of what happens in the movements of life and death in which we exist.
Broad and unblended brushstrokes and polychrome palettes are signatures of your style. This style is as reminiscent of the impressionist countryside esquisse as it is of an expressionist street scene. The effect on the eye is a kaleidoscopic brilliance, and it is quite striking. Through your technique and handling of paint in this manner, what is your intended effect on the viewer?
To me, painting is about feeling deeply. This “feeling” might be emotional, affective, intellectual, or sensory. I use the necessary means and materials to provoke the same deep feeling in the viewer as best as I think it would work. This changes with time and experimentation. Years ago, I mainly used impasto as the primary way to communicate this. Still, now I’m playing more with different ways of finding textures, colours, space, composition, density, layering, and other elements that give me the possibility of a more complex visual language and a more assertive economy of the materials.
For some, immersion in the natural world would be the ideal site of tranquillity and meditation – a place where they could feel connected to their original point of genesis. For others, the same experience would evoke terror and isolation, that they had encountered an environment in which they had to compete and inevitably lose. Whether one is Hobbes or Rousseau, your work confronts us with the impression of nature unleashed and untainted by human intervention. How important, from a broad perspective, is the problematic and asymmetric relation between humanity and nature to you? Is humanity’s vandalism of the natural world something you think about when you paint nature at its most noble?
I would first say that in my experience of nature, I am both the one who finds tranquillity and the one who is terrified. I embrace that tension and find it the most propitious place to create. I try my best not to idealise what it is to immerse myself in this landscape or what my place in it is. I am both the caretaker and the threat; every day, I have to choose what role I will play. I believe this struggle is present in my paintings.
This question also reminds me of a poem by Basilio Sánchez in his book, “He heredado un nogal sobre la tumba de los reyes.” The last three stanzas read as follows:
“[…]Es verdad
que en la idea del jardín subyace oculta
la idea del sufrimiento,
la de que prevalece
sobre el orden de la naturaleza
el orden de los hombres.
Es verdad que, a menudo,
sin pensar en las cosas,
logramos extraer de lo arbitrario
la materia de la celebración.
Pero cuido un jardín y he iluminado
con dos cerezas rojas una parte del mundo.”*
In the complexity of what the human role in nature might be, there is the possibility to find beauty in the details of caretaking and love of the planet we are part of.
*I shamelessly asked ChatGPT to translate the poem for the purpose of this interview. I also edited it following what I understood was more in accord with the spirit of the poem:
“[…]It is true
that in the idea of the garden lies hidden
the idea of suffering,
the idea that
over the order of nature
prevails the order of men.
It is true that, often,
without thinking of things,
we manage to extract from the arbitrary
the matter of celebration.
But I tend a garden, and I have illuminated
a part of the world with two red cherries.”
The landscape and flora of Puerto Rico find themselves the subject of many of your paintings. Present in your work is the bugambilia with its magenta ornamentals, the flamboyán tree and its yellow chrome flowers, as well as the arboreal yagrumo. You have an almost scientific approach to recording the unique qualities of different flowers and plants essential to the ecosystem of PR. Can you tell us something about your relationship to forests and ecosystems of Puerto Rico specifically and your experience with the artist residency project at Bayamón?
It’s interesting that you find my approach scientific because I see it far from that. For me, it is more like a familiar relationship, like the flowers are my siblings, the river is my mother, the waves of the beach are my brother, the sky is my grandpa or grandma, the tree is my father, and so on. Very much like Saint Francis of Assisi‘s Canticle of the Sun. Or like the worldview of many original peoples of Abya Yala. The relationship is one of love, respect, and belonging, not possession. I also pursue this in the way I refer to the land in my paintings.
The Bayamón Artist Residency is a government-funded opportunity for artists to further develop their practices. It provides housing and a studio for one to three years. I was born in Bayamón and lived in San Juan before being selected to participate in the project. It was significant to be part of it, and it gave me the push I needed to make my next move and come to London.
Your next show in London will be with the nomadic project space Matt Carey-Williams on the 28th of January – 27th of February. The title of this presentation, or “scene” as the gallery self-styles their exhibitions, is “The Hymn of the Toads”. We are told of this exhibition that eleven paintings will develop your “impassioned dig into the alphabet, archaeology and geology of painting.” Could you tell us some more about the title of the exhibition and what it refers to, and could you tell us something about how you arrived at this latest collection of works?
“The Hymn of the Toads” is, once again, a celebration of the place I love and know as home, Puerto Rico, textured and coloured by the experiences of this new moment of my life in London. These paintings are an expression of longing and belonging by finding a familiar voice in the song sung from the heart of the least expected, the small, the amphibians, the perennial creatures that keep alive the spirit of the land against the many threats of extinction. The exhibition takes its title after “El himno de los sapos” (Evaristo Ribera Chevremont), which my dear friend Mell Rivera-Diaz kindly helped me translate to share with my non-Spanish-speaking friends. It is also an echo of some paintings I’ve grown up knowing and that are now bringing new life to my imagination (Carlos Raquel Rivera’s “Paisaje de La Jurada” and “Paroxismo,” among others). This exploration continues my ten years of practice and, more recently, the questions and unfoldings I got into during my MA year at the Royal College of Art.