Pausa, Circa 2000

Sergio Martinez  

Sergio Martínez Cifuentes was born in Concepción, Chile, on the 7th of July 1966. When he was still a boy, he excelled in drawing, which along with his poems and short musical compositions began to mould his adolescent persona into a romantic and an existentialist form. It was during this phase that he took part in many youth art competitions where he obtained a significant number of prizes, which helped him understand the true importance of his relationship with plastic arts and so he started his self-teaching process.

During his first phase he took to descriptive realism, and showed great mastery of forms and an elegant and contained use of colour in his landscapes, which were his main subject. In 1987 he married Lizeth who became the first subject of his first portraits and nudes, with which he discovered a new challenge in the human form. This he has proved by making the nude the subject which from the 1990s has dominated almost all of his canvases. From their beginning, his portraits became an important part of this artist's work. He is not happy merely to find a simple likeness of the person who is being painted: in his search for perfectionism he hopes to capture the gestures and crucial features of the person. He is associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, because of the interesting interpretive brushstrokes in his compositions, and the effects of volume and light do not seem to be difficult to him. For eleven years he directed his own painting workshops (1992-2003) in Concepción, Chile, with a large number of people with whom he has exhibited important works in the city. Since 2002 he has taken part in international art fairs of which Caracas, Buenos Aires, California and New York are worthy of mention. Since the end of 2002 he has been represented by Global Fine art in the United States and Canada. 2003 saw him complete a mural in Kingston College in Concepción. He later moved to Spain and settled in Madrid where he lives today. From 2004 Sergio Martínez has worked with the prestigious Sammer Gallery which has a permanent exhibition of his works. In recent years he has exhibited in various European galleries such as the Albemarle Gallery in London and the Vazquez Kunst Gallery in Blaricum, Holland. 

At present his work is exhibited in the Cuadro Fine Art Gallery in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This spring he is invited to exhibit in Gallery Petley's in London. Today we are likely to find Sergio surrounded by large canvases with stunning scenes of beautiful dancers. It deeply evokes the harmony and the beauty of the careful poses. He has been immersed in his “Dancers" series for over two years and it will shortly be launched. According to the artist: “ Dancers are a inexhaustible resource which is tremendously seductive, by depicting them I can transmit things; they take comfort in each other, they confide in each other, they wait for auditions, they gaze at the audience from behind the curtains and they apply make-up. Whatever it is you have to say, whether it is simple or complicated, is transformed into beauty when it is said by means of a gesture or a movement by these magical performers".