PAST PROJECT

Emilio Adán Martínez

Emilio Adán Martínez was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1954. He earned his BFA from Florida International University in 1995.

Martínez has worked in many artistic disciplines. His years spent in fashion design and garment construction became a solid foundation for his later work in photography, drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture.

His latest works are wood and metal constructions that are suspended in space, conveying a sense lightness and aeriality despite the weightiness of the forms. This duality is also contained in that the fanciful constructions are both refined and raw, figurative and abstract, contemporary and yet could be vestiges from a lost primitive culture.

Asser Saint-Val

Asser Saint-Val was born in Haiti and lives and works in Miami, Florida. He earned his BFA from New World School of the Arts/University of Florida in 2002.

Saint Val says of his work: "The biology of skin color, in a profound manner, has always captured my imagination - why it matters that my skin is dark or my hair is dark and kinky, for instance. These questions became pressing when I moved from Haiti to the US, and experienced racial discrimination for the first time. I began researching neuromelanin, the pineal gland, consciousness, and expressed my findings in paintings. This investigation led me to examine many facets of my identity, spirituality, and the realm of thought form. This fascination with neuromelanin springs from a desire to understand the profound nature of my identity.

Neuromelanin is a dark pigment secreted by the pineal gland, found in the center of the brain. René Descartes theorized that the pineal gland is, "the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed." Dr. Richard King posited, "On a philosophical plane, the pineal gland is the biological doorway through which the life force of African spirituality passes in moving from the spirit to the material realm."

My paintings are quasi-figurative, by turns humorous and grotesque, and bring together ideas, people, and incidents central to modern debates about neuromelanin. I use a blend of traditional art media, and a wide range of unconventional organic materials - coffee, chocolate, ginger, tea and flour among them - to convey the rich layers of neuromelanin. My pictures, objects, and environments are a surreal fantasia on loosely linked themes such as under-recognized African-American inventors, the politics of sexual desire, and the complex aesthetics, narratives and metaphors attached to neuromelanin."