Pow Martinez Exposes the Dark Side of Wealth and Social Media

Pow Martinez’s self-titled exhibit in Silverlens Manila features recent works from the artist in his distinctively dreamlike style. The new exhibit, which opened on July 25, depicts the lives of wealthy people as seen on social media. 

Stylistically, Martinez’s work here bends shapes and perspectives in interesting ways, creating caricatures of people in mockery of their cultural shallowness. The works reveal the ugliness in beauty—as if to suggest that no aesthetic filter can mask the emptiness of the soul. 

“The worlds he depicts are derived from the digital landscape we often find ourselves immersed in, his inspirations being movie tropes, pop culture moments, and the broader expanse of the online space,” the exhibit write-up said. “Martinez presents varying sizes of cartoonish paintings set in these eclectic worlds featuring a cast of recurring characters including cowboys, monsters, and soldiers.”

Vanity of Social Media

Some of the paintings in this collection showcase different social media tropes performed by rich people online. There’s “morality police,” which harkens back to those publicly-denounced pictures of rich people posing next to wild animals they killed. “inner critic” also seems to call back how influencers get showy with their luxury items. 

Of course, Martinez puts kinks in the depictions. For one, almost all the characters have an ugly tan and blonde hair reminiscent of Donald Trump. For another, the works just remove any sense of luxury that people could be jealous about. 

“wiggle room” portrays two people inside of a large jeep, but there’s no shine or filter to make the vehicle or its passengers look untouchable. Instead, they look so cartoony and detached from reality that it might as well be a cheap animated Barbie knockoff. 

Overt political commentary exists within pieces like “mental door” or “battle cry.” The former shows an angry old man stagnantly watching television, while the latter shows a soldier giving marching orders while in a tank. “mental door,” in particular, appears to comment on how our own perspectives on things are skewed by the media we consume on a day-to-day basis. 

Creating Dreamlike Cultures from Digital Spaces

An interesting thing about some of the paintings here is their sizes: some of these paintings are around the same size as a phone screen to really put you in the headspace of social media. It’s a neat aesthetic trick, but it also shows the skill of Martinez that each of the smaller 8×8 or 8×12 paintings contain the same amount of details as the larger works. 

“strange appearance,” for example, layers multiple discordant images one after the other. It contains the pyramids in the background, and a person holding a snake, and two people enjoying the beach. That painting piles on the cliches, and mirrors a bit the way our attention shifts when using social media.

Martinez’s approach for the exhibit’s commentary on society is to show how untethered from reality it is. For its users, social media is mythmaking and the creation of heroic narratives for themselves. The grotesqueness of the figures detaches us from them personally, but the situations they’re in reminds us that “normal” in social media isn’t necessarily “normal” in real life.

“boss fight,” one of the larger paintings made for the exhibit, shows how un-normal social media can be. The image of a man riding a horse killing a snake reminds people of politically-charged art which depict political figures in a heroic light. It’s the “us versus them,” black and white mentality, one that social media perpetuates to all its viewers. 

Pow Martinez shows the painter’s comical depictions of society has not lost its edge. In fact, the images will likely get more and more topical as people continue to recede towards the online space. Nothing can apparently separate us more from our humanity, and it shows us the ugliness we participate in when we log in. 

Related reading: Silhouettes and a silvery glow welcome visitors to the new Silverlens

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