Major Series
Unconventional portraiture exploring the frailty of the body, the passage of time, and the stories flesh carries.
"You can't use a single instrument to play a symphony. I let the concept dictate the technique — and the medium."— René Patrick Martinez
Each panel below was painted on top of the last, then physically cut open — the way the years cut into us. Scroll, and watch them surface the way they were made: one layer at a time.
Oil on vinyl · 12" × 12" panels · Each layer painted, sliced, and peeled to reveal the one beneath.
Animated portrait works minted as 1/1 pieces — where brush, scan, and code share the same canvas.
Born in Los Angeles in 1976 to a blue-collar Latino family, René forged his practice outside traditional academic pathways — letting life, travel, and self-taught wisdom shape the work instead.
His portraiture captures more than faces: the psychological and metaphysical narratives that run beneath them. The medium is never fixed — oil, newsprint, photography, motion — each chosen because the concept demanded it.
The work pushes against the boundaries of traditional art circles, built on a conviction that art should provoke thought in anyone who stands in front of it — regardless of their fluency in fine art.
