Oscar Luis Martinez is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work resonates with the spiritual gravity and emotional rawness of ancestral memory. Currently based in Chicago, Martinez paints on a grand scale, using vibrant, sweeping strokes that meld corporeal realism with surrealist vision. His art is steeped in the traditions of his Caribbean roots, pulling iconography from Santería, indigenous spiritual systems, and colonial history. Through his paintings, Martinez creates a visual vocabulary of transformation, where bodies shift into beasts, spirits emerge from foliage, and history seeps through each layer of paint.
Trained in Medical Art at the University of Illinois, Martinez brings an anatomical precision to his otherwise expressionistic, emotionally charged work. This unique combination of technical skill and spiritual inquiry infuses his canvases with a dual presence at once grounded in the flesh and transcendent in meaning. For over twenty years, he has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, contributing significantly to the recognition of Puerto Rican visual arts in diaspora communities. Beyond his own studio practice, Martinez has served as a curator and mentor, engaging deeply with community-centered projects and educational initiatives.
The Language of Roots, Horns, and Dreams
Martinez’s paintings are not mere images; they are invocations. Mythic resonance pulses through every figure, every landscape, every symbolic element. His compositions often depict bodies entwined with natural and mystical forms: roots growing from limbs, horns emerging from skulls, spirits breaking through skin. These visual metaphors speak to complex narratives of cultural inheritance, hybrid identity, and generational trauma. They suggest a world in flux where the physical and metaphysical, the historical and the personal, are inseparably bound.
Expressionism meets mysticism in Martinez’s work, resulting in a visceral intensity that challenges the viewer to feel rather than decode. The colors are tropical and bold burnt oranges, emerald greens, and deep indigos, yet the emotional atmosphere is layered with tension. There is beauty here, yes, but also rupture, displacement, and yearning. His paintings become a space where diasporic longing meets spiritual reckoning.
“Borinken” (2025): A Portal to Ancestral Terrain
One of Martinez’s recent and most commanding works is Borinken (2025), an oil painting that embodies the full power of his vision. Named after the indigenous Taíno name for Puerto Rico, Borinken is both an homage and an invocation. The canvas, monumental in scale, invites viewers into a surreal topography where land, spirit, and body are one. Tropical vegetation morphs into veins and arteries, a central figure appears half-human, half-deity, and the sky pulses with an otherworldly glow.
At the heart of the painting is a sense of return not to a literal homeland, but to a psychic space of origin and healing. Borinken functions as a portal between worlds, where the trauma of colonialism and the resilience of cultural memory collide in luminous brushwork. The piece reflects Martinez’s ongoing dialogue with identity and displacement, yet it also gestures toward liberation through remembrance, through transformation, and through spiritual continuity.
Art as Resistance and Ritual
For Martinez, painting is not only a means of expression but also a ritual act of reclamation. His visual language borrows from Yoruba cosmology, Taíno motifs, Catholic iconography, and modernist abstraction. The result is a richly syncretic form of storytelling that resists fixed interpretations. In a world that often demands assimilation, Martinez paints hybridity as power.
His figures are never passive. They are warriors, shamans, guardians, sometimes wounded, always powerful. Through them, Martinez explores what it means to carry culture within the body: to be shaped by it, burdened by it, and ultimately transformed by it. In this sense, his work becomes both deeply personal and profoundly universal, engaging anyone who has grappled with displacement, heritage, or identity.
The Chicago Connection: Diaspora as Dialogue
Living and working in Chicago, a city with a rich history of Puerto Rican activism and art, Martinez is part of a broader movement of cultural reclamation through the arts. His engagement with the community includes curatorial collaborations, mentorship programs, and public dialogues on Afro-Caribbean and Latinx identity in the visual arts. In bridging the island and the mainland, Martinez positions art as a medium of cultural survival and intergenerational connection.
His studio practice is informed by this ethos. Each painting is not just a solitary act, but part of a larger cultural and spiritual conversation, one that stretches from the ceremonial altars of Santería to the streets of Humboldt Park.
Conclusion: A Visual Theology of Survival
Oscar Luis Martinez’s work transcends categories. It is at once contemporary and ancestral, corporeal and cosmic. With each canvas, he charts new terrain emotionally, spiritually, and historically. His paintings do not ask to be interpreted; they ask to be felt, absorbed, and remembered.
Borinken and other works in his evolving portfolio are testaments to an artist deeply attuned to the rhythms of identity, memory, and transformation. Martinez does not merely depict Puerto Rican experience; he channels it, reimagines it, and offers it back to the world as a sacred offering.
In a time when cultural narratives are often flattened or erased, Oscar Luis Martinez paints with the force of myth and the precision of ritual, ensuring that the stories of his people not only survive but rise, fierce and luminous, from the canvas.
