To Sink the Shallow and Raise the Deep

“To Sink the Shallow and Raise the Deep” presents a focused consideration of Leslie Martinez’s practice over the past several years. The exhibition is timed with their selection as the 2026 keynote speaker for the Visionary Lecture Series. Bringing together early large-scale works with recent experiments in size and scale, the presentation traces Martinez’s evolving approach to painting as a process of accumulation, transformation and return.

Martinez’s material language is shaped by what is available, what remains and what can be carried forward. Studio rags, jersey, terry cloth, acrylic wastewater, pigment sediment and other remnants are cut, sewn, stained, embedded and reworked, sometimes over many years. Through this ongoing processing, the mundane is granted weight and memory. Materials hold traces of Martinez’s time in Connecticut while at Yale, as well as New York, Arizona, Texas and the spaces between. Driving across Southwestern landscapes becomes a form of looking and knowing, a prolonged encounter with shifting terrain, architecture, economy, surveillance and belonging.

Martinez’s practice is grounded in rasquachismo, a term coined by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Fausto to describe a Chicanx “underdog perspective rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.” Martinez’s no-waste ethic enables them to wield a vernacular of painting that engages the formal legacies of abstraction while honoring generational practices of survival and sustenance learned from their family. In these works, materials are active carriers of use, memory and place. They settle, separate, stain and absorb, holding the shallow and the deep in restless relation.