Smoke Section: Booth S7
October 9 - 13, 2024 

OPENING HOURS
Wednesday Preview, October 9 (invitation only): 11am – 7pm
Thursday Preview, October 10: 11am – 7pm
Friday, October 11: 11am – 7pm
Saturday, October 12: 11am – 7pm
Sunday, October 13: 11am – 6pm

PATRON is proud to announce our participation in Frieze London 2024 as part of Smoke, curated by Pablo José Ramirez, Curator, Hammer Museum. PATRON’s presentation will recontextualize an installation of ceramic works by Indigenous Mexican artist, Noé Martínez, which have been a highlight of recent significant institutional presentations; at the 14th Gwangju Biennale and the Rose Art Museum.

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.



His ceramic 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 3 sculpture. Enacted in the artist’s own performances, 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.