A Chicano in a Color Field: César Augusto Martínez's Bato con Sunglasses

The painting Bato con Sunglasses by César Augusto Martínez articulates the incommensurable position of US artists who have germinated their practices in solidarity with communities alienated by white normativity. Before starting his Bato/Pachuco/Ruca portrait series in the late 1970s, Martínez had belonged to the artistic arm of the first social movement for Mexican-American representation. It is at the point in his career, when he began painting barrio characters isolated against planes of expressive color, that Martínez makes a compelling study of being a Chicano artist and simply becoming an “Artist.” With the prospect of dropping his hyphenated identity for a cultural establishment with apolitical pretensions, Martínez balances loyalty to La Raza and his ambiente, or barrio sensibility. His most successful series, the Bato paintings wrangle an uncanny union of aesthetic and ideological opponents on canvas, a lampoon or a dream in which a quintessential Brown person photobombs the sacrosanct space of high art. Although color fields are a signature of this series, stylistic assessments have rarely positioned these “backgrounds” and other forays into formalism by Latinx artists within a synchronous view of American abstraction. Situating Martínez in critical dialogue with abstraction exposes the conflicts between unassimilated expressions of minority experience and the tenets of the style that enjoyed the most institutional acclaim in the US during the twentieth century. Bato con Sunglasses intersects the specificity of being Mexican-American with the universality of being “modern” while disabusing modern abstraction of its professed neutrality.