Martin Kačmarek brings to mind so many of the greatest social realist and realist painters of the last hundred years or more. I think of Diego Rivera, Andrew Wyeth, Jacob Lawrence, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, José Clemente Orozco, even Dorothea Lange. Not in style, but in essence and subjectivity. On the surface, you could look at the van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, as well, but Kačmarek is working through a different prism, a different scope. He takes all that we know about socialism, labor, 21st century advances in technology and the replacement of workers, and creates a stunning series of works in Field Key, on view in Tuesday to Friday in Valencia.
What is so evident in Martin Kačmarek works, just like the contemporary painter/animator Matt Bollinger and his elegant Ash Can aesthetic in America, is that there is something quite solid in the foundation of the paint. They have a weight of aesthetic. A thickness of life. Bringing elements of an old practice and subject matter to the 21st century, Kačmarek reminds us that even as so many of his contemporaries have forgone the social realist aesthetic for something more transformatively synthetic, there is something compelling about how art could both enhance and heightened our understand of workers in the face of Capitalism. —Evan Pricco
