Antonio Martorell
San Juan, P.R., 1939
San Juan, P.R., 1939
Printmaker, painter, illustrator, creator of installations, set and costume designer, writer, draftsman and professor. After completing diplomacy studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he opted to pursue the arts. In 1961, with a scholarship granted by the Ferré Foundation, he studied painting and drawing with artist Julio Martín Caro in Madrid. Upon his return to the island, he started his printmaking learning process under the tutelage of Lorenzo Homar at the Printmaking Workshop of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. He created the Alacrán Workshop in 1968, one of the first independent printmaking workshops in Puerto Rico. He was director of this workshop‑art school until 1971, a venue characterized by his commitment to the social denunciation of reality and national politics. He has taught graphic arts in Puerto Rico, Argentina, Colombia and México (where he resided from 1978 to 1984), and has created, organized and sponsored artistic, community and cultural multimedia events as an integral part of his passion for human and artistic expression. Also, he has designed scenography and costumes for multiple plays, and has created numerous installations and performances. His work transmits his freedom and exceptional creative talent in figurative compositions that illustrate his penchant for portraiture and his love for the written word, typography, theater, playfulness and the sensual-sensory.
"Why do I prefer the unfinished instead of the final painting, mixed media techniques to the pure, the process to the product? Those are the questions that I've asked myself many times... Let’s begin with the sketch, the unfinished that is forewarning, preview that does not satisfy us, that instead enhances both artist and viewer’s appetite inducing in both upon completion an active participation that leads to imagine it in a subjective way and never final. The painting, unfinished in appearance, entails so many conclusions that it is impossible to exhaust them. There is a revealing affinity between the sketch and the ruin. The sketch promises, the ruin evokes. In one, the future is present, in the other the present vanishes part of its past and forces us to dream it. Both propose journeys: past and future appear and disappear as possible destinations... Unexpected things happen in these frontier roads: improbable translations, pleasurable slips, mortal somersaults. It is to return to all the lovers in a perpetual, simultaneous orgy. It is to be free with an increased firm stance, contradictory and inviting. But these calculated, and not so much, risks would be impossible without a theme, an issue that is more than an excuse to embark on an adventure.”
Source: Díaz-Royo, Antonio T. Martorell: la aventura de la creación. San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2008.
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Díaz-Royo, Antonio T. Martorell: la aventura de la creación. San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2008.
Martorell, Antonio. “El libro dibujado, el dibujo librado”. San Juan: Ediciones Envergadura, 1995.
Martorell, Antonio. “El velorio (no vela)”. Ediciones R.I.P, 2010.
Martorell, Antonio. “Pierdencuentra”. Ediciones Gaviota, 2018
Interconexiones: Lecturas Curatoriales de la Colección del MAPR, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2012.