PATRON is proud to announce our participation at Frieze London 2024 as part of Smoke, curated by Pablo José Ramirez, Curator, Hammer Museum. PATRON’s presentation will highlight a grouping of new work by Indigenous Mexican artist, Noé Martínez. Martínez’s practice is informed by the stories of his ancestors, the Huastec people—indigenous to east-central Mexico. Rooted in his research into ancestral texts, oral narratives, and visual histories, Martínez initiates an invested dialogue with the ongoing traces of colonialism. Drawing upon ancestral Huastecan practices of conceptual representation and ritual performance, gravely interrupted by colonial oppression, Martínez’s work seeks to subvert a Western, hegemonic assertion on contemporary art history.

Martinez’s sculptures, metaphors for the body, serve as energetic containers, conduits to Huastecan visual and spiritual traditions. Here, a grouping of glazed sgraffito figural ceramics, inspired by pre-conquest Huastecan pottery, commune around a suspended Racimo sculpture. Enacted in the artist’s own performances, the Racimo’s form is developed after ritual rattles and musical instruments found in archaeological burial sites of the Huasteca region. By contemporizing these ancient indigenous forms and icons, Martinez highlights a conceptual continuity of visual culture, and embodied tradition, that spans hundreds of years.

Functioning as a narrative counterpoint are Martinez’s paintings on unstretched cotton which draw from pictorial storytelling traditions of post-conquest Mexico to depict historical instances of erasure and displacement. Incorporating layers of gold leaf–the material witness and catalyst of colonialism are balanced with delicately rendered images of herbs and plants, ancestrally recognized for their healing properties. Once erased from visual histories, Martínez reintroduces these scenes into the cultural
lexicon as a mode of validation and healing. For Martínez, acknowledging the traditions, and tragedies of the distant, and recent past are part of an ongoing, and active ritual–to heal the individual, and collective body from colonial trauma.