Marthalicia Matarrita

Painter

Marthalicia Matarrita is a brilliant painter. Nothing else really needs to be said – although there is plenty to her story. Her passion is sparked and sustained by the fundamentals of hip-hop and live painting. However, the depth of her work in texture, mood and content reveals much more. With a family background that includes infinite love and loyalty peppered with alcoholism, homelessness, schizophrenia, limited funds and shelter living, Marthalicia has reached a point in her life where her spirit is grounded in hope, discovery, community, and her siblings.

Marthalicia’s paintings speak the language of the soul. Power, individuality and movement infuse each work in a reflection and metaphor of human endurance and the triumph of the spirit. In a way that only artists can articulate she uses paint to express the inexpressible – the sensations and feelings housed within the human body that call out to a larger universe for a voice.

This element of expression in her work finds a home in the hip-hop lexicon of imagery that is after all fundamentally about knowledge of self, spontaneity inflected with divine essence and having fun. Her articulation of emotion through a tricked out hip-hop form gives Marthalicia’s deeply powerful work a lightness of being. Whether it is the use of references, colors or inflections each piece translates effortlessly into an urban dialogue. On top of this, traces of surrealism, cubism and even perhaps a 21st century Rufino Tamayo, can be found interspersed in her painterly language.

PHOTOGRAPHIES