Jel Martinez | Remnants
June 7th, 2025 - July 5th, 2025
Join K Contemporary and Jel Martinez on Saturday, June 7th, 2025 from 3 - 6 PM for an opening reception at K Contemporary, located at 1412 Wazee Street, Denver, CO
Note: Please check back in the coming weeks for additional images.
K Contemporary is proud to introduce the work of Miami-based artist, Jel Martinez, whose practice originates in 1980s street art.
Featured throughout the 1990s and early 2000s alongside heralded "writers” such as Kaws, Barry McGee (“Twist”), Jose Parla (Ink Heads Crew), and OSGEMEOS, Martinez’s work can be found in foundational zines such as Can Control, 12oz Prophet, On the Run, Fatcap, and Undercover. As early as 2003, international brands like Altoids began recruiting Martinez to design walls and campaigns associating their products with his intrepid street art. More recent projects include commissions by companies like Formula One Grand Prix (racing) and Ripple (cryptocurrency).
By 2008, Martinez had met legendary real estate and art impresarios, Tony Goldman and Jeffrey Deitch, in Miami and joined their visionary project Wynwood Walls, where he befriended and collaborated with Phase 2, the OG of bubble writing ubiquitous to NYC subway cars. Martinez continued to exhibit in Wynwood, considered the world capital of street art, in tandem with Shepherd Fairy, Nunca, and Futura and was soon showing at international art fairs such as Scope, Pulse, and Untitled Art. Notable exhibitions and venues he’s been included in are Flip the Script (NYC), Urban Abstraction (Phoenix), The Museum of Graffiti, and RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver).
Entitled Remnants, Martinez's first show at K Contemporary, recalls deteriorating graffiti walls in the very public and urban settings Jel once marked by night. Over time, paint and tags begin to fade, mold grows, weather and pollution take their toll, and painted layers start to peel. Martinez’s foray into gallery-purposed work hearkens this phenomenon as past acts of self-expression reemerge suggesting “remnants” of what once was. Old tags, forgotten writing, and the history of a wall slowly resurface through decay and are paid homage in Martinez’s new work. The process becomes a collaboration between human intention and nature’s persistence.
Jennifer Berry, K Contemporary’s Director, explains, “Remnants is an aesthetic revisiting of Jel’s public wall surfaces, allowing his prior knowledge to guide the layers and gestures in his new work. He calls this adapted approach “urban abstraction” where he reconstructs the textured surfaces of walls that have been marked, covered, and abraded over time. Each painting reflects a dialogue between memory and erasure, presence and absence, and the beauty found in what’s left behind.”
The painting Community Service (40 Hours) references the amount of retribution time at-risk youth were required to perform for petty offenses in the Miami area during Martinez’s adolescence. Among other civic chores, teens were gathered to clean or “buff” out graffiti-covered walls. Local hardware stores would donate “oops” paint to the cause – buckets whose shades were irregular and didn’t match conventional color recipes. These batches were swathed on walls with comparable tints to both resemble but cover the tagging beneath. Martinez recalls the results looked like floating rectangles by Mark Rothko. He explains, “Over the years, my interests began to evolve. I became equally intrigued by what came after the city’s attempts to erase those marks – the buffing, the removal.”
In terms of intent and emotion, Martinez’s current process feels very similar to how he approached “writing” (graffiti) in the past. He conjures some of the rapid execution required to avoid getting caught “bombing” at night with his original Ink Heads Crew. He adds, “It’s like reliving the wild things I did after dark, but now I have an opportunity to refine and take my time. It’s no longer inevitable that my work will be buffed or decay.” Now the artist has complete artistic control.