LONDON.- From 8 to 13 September 2025, Ordovas presents a solo exhibition by
José Jun Martínez, winner of the 2024 Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Award. Perennial Paroxysm is centred around a group of five new paintings by the London-based Puerto Rican artist whose practice spans a decade of immersive contemplation in natural environments. The works on view range from a large diptych painted with oil on canvas and measuring 160cm x 400cm to a complementary group of smaller-scale works.
The Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust was established in 2006 after the death of Valerie Beston (1922–2005) who was renowned for supporting and nurturing the careers of many of the leading artists working in London throughout her extraordinary fifty-year career, including Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The charity was established to support artists at the beginning of their careers; it has since collaborated with the Royal College of Art to award an annual prize to a postgraduate student selected from its degree show. The prize comprises a studio for a year at SPACE, a financial contribution towards materials, tutorial support generously provided by the RCA, and a solo exhibition at the end of the year, held since 2020 at Ordovas.
José Jun Martínez paints places of encounter for ecological, historical, and poetic reflections that transcend location specificity, creating sensorial, conceptual, and emotional bridges of experience. Approaching the subjects from an immersive perspective, the paintings embody a sense of solidarity and a commitment to liberation. Coming from Puerto Rico, a land that, like many others, is historically threatened and exploited by colonial structures, Martínez insists on painting as an act of reaffirmation while holding the tensions between beauty and violence, praise and lament, celebration and protest.
The paintings in Perennial Paroxysm continue Martínez’s search for a communication of the ways in which the lives of the people and the life of the land share a common history. For the past year, Martinez has been ruminating on a painting by Puerto Rican artist Carlos Raquel Rivera, titled Paroxismo (1963), among others by the same artist, like Paisaje de la Jurada (1961) and Niebla (1961-1965).
Martinez’s maternal family comes from Yauco, a rural town in southern Puerto Rico, where Carlos Raquel was also from. Yauco’s landscape, a reference for two of the paintings in this exhibition — Nocturnal Uprising and Maña y Maraña (Trick and Tangle) — is at the core of Martinez’s childhood memories and his intuitive impulse towards painting from nature.
This recent series of works is also influenced by the mysticism of Rivera’s landscape paintings, which appear inhabited by enigmatic entities, like spirits or mythological creatures. In Martinez’s paintings, these presences are translated into abstract lines and brushstrokes of light blue, magenta, and yellow, which are highlighted from pre- existing forms that the artist finds in the visual references of the landscapes he is treating as subject. As in a Blakeian exercise of two-folded vision, Martinez’s eyes are looking for these spirits of the land, which bond together human and other-than human experiences, bringing with them, sometimes as a whisper and others as a loud cry, an ages-old history of the urge for liberation.
José Jun Martínez (Bayamón, 1992) is a London-based visual artist from Puerto Rico. His practice spans a decade of immersive contemplation in natural environments, translating his perceptions and memories into a language of painting materiality. 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 this prize. His recent solo exhibitions include The Hymn of the Toads (Matt Carey- Williams, London, 2025), Interludio del Viento (Galeria Leyendecker, Tenerife, 2025), and Hermano de las Flores (Museo de San Juan, San Juan, 2025).
