Patrick Martinez
February 11, 2025
Patrick Martinez has a message for Boston—one that can’t be ignored. Through striking neon works and layered landscape paintings, he spotlights urgent issues, from climate change to housing insecurity, in ways that spark necessary conversations.
Is it correct that you got your start as an artist doing graffiti?
Yes, but I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember. Growing up, I copied comic book and cartoon characters. My older brother was already doing graffiti, so I understood there was a socially engaged culture in graffiti early on.
I was probably eleven when I picked up spray can art. I got swept up in trying to manipulate the medium and the social aspect of it. I felt very connected to it. I was an awkward, shy kid. This felt like something I could really sink my teeth into. Graffiti opened me up by allowing me to make art out of things that you're not supposed to make art out of—spray paint was sold at the hardware store. That experience laid the groundwork for how I make art today.
There are parallels between your neon art installations and graffiti. I came across a quote of yours in which you say that the neon signs almost function as “community advertising.” Can you expand on that?
With graffiti, I would think about how I was engaging with and looking at the landscape. We would see the city from different vantage points—on rooftops, etc.—that allowed us to think a lot about our surroundings. When you're a graffiti artist, you spend a lot of time just looking around, thinking about where you can put something that will function as a public advert, in a sense. That got me thinking about how storefront signage figures into the landscape.
Back in 2005, when I had a studio in downtown Los Angeles, the neon signs would still be on when I was driving home at night. The stores were closed, but the signs would still be advertising the business: “Notary Public Checks Cashed”, you know, or “We Buy Gold”, things like that. The visibility of the messaging reminded me of what graffiti artists write. I started thinking about signs as messaging about the time we're living in, like warning signs that could unearth the past or refresh and bring new meaning to clichés.
Much like graffiti, my neon work responds to conversations with friends and family about the struggles we encounter daily.
Your work's site-specificity comes through in its responsiveness to both the environment it inhabits and the communities present in those spaces.
On one level, my neon work is responding to advertising. It leads you to think about how we digest things on a daily basis. Corporations want to push things on us. We took advertising classes in college and learned things like the color combinations that can make someone feel hungry. I want to unplug from that in the work I make, or better yet, think about how I can do that in another form. What could that look like? What would we be talking about?
Essentially, I am sampling and remixing messaging from books and novels by giving texts visual form and placing the signs in a gallery or museum setting—or, in the case of the Triennial, in a public space. The messages in these pieces are urgent, so the works function as warning signs.
In my Triennial project, I want to illuminate the reality of being unhoused. I want people to understand their proximity to being unhoused. This project is personal. It’s something that I think about a lot. The young folks I spoke to about their experiences being unhoused really drove it home. The messaging that I came up with through these conversations is very direct. Again, the neons are warning signs.
The majority of people are much closer to being unhoused than they are to becoming billionaires.
Yes, and with the fires in LA this year, there is a lot of sadness and frustration about the preventative measures that were not taken. Of course, it’s also an issue of climate change. The Earth is telling us that it doesn't matter if you have a house, it can be taken away in the span of an hour. The fires have broken down this barrier in people’s thinking in a major way: an unhoused person you see on the street could easily be someone who had a house just last week.
Understanding how the housing and the climate crises are intertwined is critical. A lot of your work responds to changing landscapes, whether the changes are socio-economic in nature or due to climate change.
As an artist, you're always paying attention. I think a lot about the materials and structures being eroded and replaced by new aesthetics. When you pay attention, you witness a lot of visual changes in the landscape.
In the past, people would do landscape paintings based on their observations of the scenery and employ techniques to translate what they saw with paint. I think about all those things too, but I also think about what has been erased or added—a building that is no longer there, a wall that has been knocked down, or a development appearing in a lot.
Place and the communities inhabiting that space figure significantly in your work. How do you hope people will respond to your Triennial project?
I imagine my Triennial project illuminating the streets of Boston with the warning signs we all need to see. The neons give me a chance to present viewers with a reality check.
As you mentioned earlier, you spoke with unhoused youth in Boston in preparation for this project. What do you hope the impact will be on people passing by who take the time to read these messages?
I’m hoping for urgency. I’m trying to bring visibility and urgency to the subject. Our society is so individualistic. It can be hard for people to recognize that we need to help each other. I am trying to make work that connects people through the urgency of the matters that my work addresses. It’s about housing, it’s about healthcare, it’s about the bare essentials.
I think about the neon signs as protest signs and warning signs. They are supposed to feel familiar in form so that the messages come across as though a close friend is speaking to you. I also think that the consumerist connotation of a neon sign adds that layer to the viewer’s experience. When you’re consuming and buying products, that’s money you’re spending. I hope that people also think about that when they see my Triennial project and reflect on what their money can do—or fail to do—for them.