Mars-1

Mars-1
A San Fran artist, Mars-1 (Mario Martinez) has been a very vibrant and active part of the bustling west coast art scene. His unique style strives above all else to avoid description and embrace individual interpretation. His paintings evoke surreal, sci-fi landscapes, realities that Lovecraft would depict if influenced by Roddenberry instead of Poe. I was first interested in Mario's style with his work in the vinyl toy scene. In 2006 he released the Invisible Plan line of mini-figs, produced by Strangeco. I personally have quite a few figures from this series, and the peculiar character and detail in each one surpasses most other attempts in the field. Since this inception into the L.A. art scene, Mars-1 has been an intrinsic member of a new contemporary style. Their are few other artists as prolific or talented, hopefully his beautiful abstraction and juxtapositions will influence someone style, maybe in architecture? Check out more of his work at his Flickr account,a recent issue of Juxtapoz, or samples from a wicked exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery.

MARS-1 is a left-handed artist who spends most of his time in the right side of his brain, communicating through a visual language. His unique imagery explores possibilities of otherworldly existence through highly developed, multi-layered landscapes. Often employing a fuzzy-logic aesthetic, Mars-1’s artwork has a sentient appearance, like a tulpa—which in mysticism, is the concept of a materialized thought that manifests into physical form...