A graphic designer by profession for more than twenty years, painting and sculpture give David Martín the freedom to create. "Being a graphic designer is a way of making ends meet with creativity, but maybe it's not as much fun as the artistic part. As a designer you have to adapt to the client, but with art I find freedom", he says in his workshop, near Plaza Barcelona, in Palma, among a collection of Robot invaders that watch over us attentively.
With screw legs, light bulb heads and multiform bodies, the robots are his most extensive collection, an idea that came from one of his frequent visits to the junkyard where the artist finds jewels among what the rest of mortals simply discard. He recovers pieces and gives them a second life through creations that challenge the viewer. There must be more than 200 robots around the world', he assures, since the first time he exhibited them at the Espai d'Art Miquela Nicolau in Felanitx.
Light years away from purism, his creative process does not understand corseted methods. Sometimes it's the material that inspires you to do something, sometimes you have the idea but you have to find the right material. I love jumping around and I have a great time experimenting, it's one of the things I like the most'. He tries with porexpan, with ceramics, with iron or with wood, he tries tirelessly because it is precisely in this game that he finds the possibility "to embrace more and find more solutions".
"Most of the time when I start something for myself or to give as a gift, I find a vein or some people who appreciate that specific work... and so ends up becoming something else".
In fact, it was this openness that introduced him to the world of art. His first collection of paintings was to decorate his home, but his works ended up as an exhibition. Most of the time I start something for myself or to give as a gift, I find a vein or some people who appreciate that specific work... and so it ends up becoming something else".
The human figure is capital in David Martín's work. Through it he scrutinizes our behavior but also our physiology from a provocative, disturbing look, coated with a fine and ironic sense of humor. Exploring the human body, "what we have, what we don't have, I realized that it is a theme that I use to analyze different aspects of life. Aesthetically I find that it gives a lot of play to the anatomical theme and to take it to the artistic theme, fun, I find it fascinating".
In fact, in 2019, he participated in the group exhibition Huma(no) in S'Escorxador de Marratxí along with David Campaner and Francisco García, an exhibition in which Martín explored birth, life and death as a life cycle guided by a common thread: the human figure and some existential concerns. Martín raises important questions in the form of art pieces. Direct questions without certain answers that question our obsessions, ideologies, beliefs and impossibilities - human nature, in short - such as his collection of sculptures "I can fly", in which he explores the emotions we experience when "things don't work out the way we want them to". Long airplanes, heavy airplanes, deformed airplanes, melting airplanes.
"I'm interested in seeing those layers as in the human body or the stories that buildings show when they collapse. An attractive debris allows me to play with that idea".
Another daily physiognomy, that of the city, is also an inexhaustible source of inspiration for this Mallorcan artist who observes a work or an excavation like someone who attends a surgical operation. "I am interested in seeing those layers as in the human body or the stories that buildings show when they are demolished. An attractive rubble allows me to play with that idea".
Animals do not escape his optics, always ready to play and alter concepts. His sculpture "Winning Horse", an equine in the shape of a sausage or a sausage reconverted into an equine, represents this search for aesthetics and, at the same time, "seeks to attract the viewer's attention, to amuse them. The horse is noble and is always linked to winning. The fact of making it in the form of a sausage was so funny".
Humans, animals, cities. Everything we are and everything around us has multiple layers. David Martín's ability to dissect them, always from his particular perspective, is his best endorsement. Provocative, ironic, playful, in the end, his exercise consists of playing, stirring, experimenting, arousing... to talk to us face to face and ask us transcendent, serious questions that manage to amuse us while stirring us up inside, layer by layer.
