“In the shadow of my mind springs light”,
Ronald Martinez

Paintings or pho­tographs? The ques­tion arises in front of the strik­ing images of Ronald Martinez, which imme­di­ately evoke the pic­to­r­ial power of the great mas­ters of the Renaissance. The artist defines him­self as ” a pho­tog­ra­pher who paints with light “. He pushes the bound­aries of pho­tog­ra­phy in his “ Nus Divins” where the dra­matic use of light sub­li­mates the sacred dimen­sion of bodies.

A pho­tog­ra­pher for more than 20 years, Ronald Martinez made his debut at the Midi Libre before open­ing his own stu­dio in Paris. Armed with his Nikon, he works in col­lab­o­ra­tion with mod­el­ing agen­cies, actors, but also with film­mak­ers such as Agnès Varda or Mathieu Demy for whom he pro­duces, in par­tic­u­lar, the shots for the poster of the film “Americano”.

From 2011, he began to work on the tech­nique of chiaroscuro. Fascinated by Renaissance paint­ing, he draws his inspi­ra­tion from the works of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Michelangelo, Vermeer and Ingres. “Unlike most pho­tog­ra­phers, I work in the shad­ows and in the com­plex­ity of my mind,” says Ronald.

Driven by the search for beauty and by a form of tran­scen­dence, Ronald Martinez has deep­ened his research around light to sculpt the con­tours of bod­ies and sub­li­mate car­na­tions, in refined works where the bor­der between paint­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy becomes per­me­able. There is no com­puter edit­ing in his work.

Seduced by these first nudes, the gallery owner Maurizio Nobile invited him to con­tinue his research in his photo stu­dio in Bologna, the city of Caravaggio, where Ronald scoured the churches and immersed him­self in reli­gious scenes from the Quattrocento. No recon­sti­tu­tion, how­ever, in the works he pro­duces, but a rein­ven­tion of paint­ing with the lan­guage of pho­tog­ra­phy which tends towards the uni­ver­sal, the timeless.

The light­ing, like the knife of desire, sculpts the sub­ject on a black back­ground which plunges it into an abyssal void. Each image sends us back to our own lone­li­ness and illus­trates the tran­si­tory aspect of life, the empti­ness of exis­tence, inevitable death… A dark part that the pho­tog­ra­pher entirely assumes.

Ronald Martinez is present in many inter­na­tional pri­vate col­lec­tions. A recog­ni­tion that leads him to con­tinue his artis­tic research on chiaroscuro.