Móyòsóré Martins Solo Show Celebrates A ‘Better Painter Than Basquiat’, Renowned Art Expert Declares

We follow the procession and progression of four male figures, led by the most mature in the forefront hoisting a possibly ancient object above his head to signal his place in art history, while the most youthful appears slightly obscured in the left distance. The Black men appear pale, their skin tone tinged by a hint of almost-seafoam green, competing for our gaze as they navigate the lush landscape bursting with vivid, inimitable colors. Our eye pauses left of top center, as we encounter a patch of naked canvas amid the vibrant monumental visual narrative richly layered with an array of elegant and passionate impasto brushstrokes. The blank space serves as a portal into the remainder of the artist’s journey – what comes next, what remains to be written – as well as an opening for the viewer to join the voyage.

Móyòsóré “Móyò” Martins’ Artist Journey (2023), a diptych spanning 12-feet-wide and more than 8½-feet-high, commands our attention as the largest work on view for Móyòsóré Martins: The Artist Journey, a pop-up solo exhibition at Crossing Art in New York’s Chelsea through July 15. Curated by Lydia Duanmu, an art advisor and vice president of the gallery, the show features paintings, sculptures, and Martins’ personal objects, drawing us closer to his practice and life. A self-described loner, Martins paints in the dark relying on his night vision in his expansive studio in Mott Haven, the Bronx, where he’s assembled an eclectic collection of art objects, ephemera, jazz records, and other curious finds that offer a window into his broad cultural influences and fancies.

Rather than a traditional signature, the self-taught mixed-media artist raised in Lagos, Nigeria, by a Brazilian father and a Nigerian mother from Ekiti state, emblazoned his name “móyòsóré” all in lower-rail black letters along the upper left of the canvas, the self-referential markings fading as “Time” in red print appears below. Martins’ birth year, “1986”, another recurring mark in his work, is inscribed in a deep crimson shade from the darkest part of the canvas on the far right middle to bottom. His real signature is his singular color palette, which defies categorization, and is further enhanced by his process of painting in the dark, conveying drama and otherworldliness.

The two youngest figures are dressed in homage to Martins’ grandfather and father, who were “seers” and wore striped clothes so they could be identified. The second-oldest man wears striped pants rolled up to the knees, possibly signaling a shift to adulthood and away from the path at home.

“It’s a symbolic representation of who they are on both sides, so it also stands for life. It is also a two-way street. You can’t only see things through your own view, you need to learn how to compromise and open and see things through other peoples’ points of view,” Martins explained during an Art Talk last week at the gallery.

Each canvas is its own journey into Martins’ creative process, building complex narratives with oil, acrylic, graphite, and collage, augmented with his own lexicon of scribbles, symbols, motifs, and iconography, presented in original colors using palette knives and brushes to reflect their own natural and imagined worlds.

“He’s a better painter than Basquiat,” proclaimed financier Asher Edelman, who began collecting art in the 1960s and by the mid-1980s had amassed an enviable contemporary art collection including key works by Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, John Chamberlain, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and others before they rocketed to to blue chip auction stardom.

Perhaps Martins will usher in a new era of Neo-Expressionism and become the art world’s next auction darling. His’ Attestation (Vouch) was showcased in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries sale in March, alongside works by Warhol, Salmon Toor, Alex Katz, Helen Frankenthaler, George Condo, Kenny Scharf, and Willem de Kooning.

In a composition similar to Attestation (Vouch), we encounter another set of enormous clenched teeth in Nothing to Lose (2023). A gaggle of yellow googly eyes look to the left, the yellow bleeding into the teeth and marking the upper left with “why” five times, and “1986” four times along the right border. A Black figure with two eyes stacked on one side of his face raises his arm revealing another eye on his palm. He’s wearing the same blue-and-white stripes and appears totemic in shape. The “seer” is watching the viewer. The title implies courage and fear, and the appearance of “why” adds to the ambiguity as we wonder if Martins is asking a question or offering an explanation.

The totemic figure in stripes becomes the focal point in More than Me (2023), both arms raised and outstretched to form a 90-degree angle with palms facing out and holding what could be talismen, suggesting a ritual and underscoring the spirituality in Martin’s practice. The yellow googly eyes reappear along with four smaller and obscured natural eyes. ‘1986” is inscribed more haphazardly on this canvas, once crossed out on the lower left, and engulfed on the lower right by a fury of red brushstrokes that guide our gaze back to the exaggerated mouth.

Allocate time to examine Martins’ elaborate cultural and personal iconographies, poring over each brushstroke, each application of paint with a palette knife, each pattern, each ineffable color, each deploy personal word and number, and each symbol that differentiates his oeuvre. The large-scale canvases undulate and pulsate with energy that’s simultaneously raw and refined, ferocious and fragile.

“His work is very much about his own story. It’s about his own inner voice. One of the things that I found so interesting and so important is that this is not about (being) inspired by other people, not inspired by other artists, not inspired by anything except his own internal conversation, and that conversation started with him as a child in Africa,” said Michelle Edelman, a curator, art collector, and founder of TrafficArts. Martins’ work “will continue to evolve, and every single painting is part of the story.”