Visual artist Domingo Martinez Follow.Art Card

About me

I am a visual artist and academic based in London. I hold a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Valencia, Spain, and was awarded a PhD Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. My practice brings together research and painting to explore cultural memory, history, and the ways images shape our understanding of the past.

I question the idea of History as fixed, singular, or authoritative, approaching it instead as fragmented, unstable, and continually open to reinterpretation. I work with anonymous photographs found in flea markets, archival imagery, historical documents, and images from contemporary media, treating them as fragmented witnesses rather than reliable records. Through painting, I reconfigure these fragments, bringing together different times, places, and narratives to create dreamlike spaces in which past and present collide.

My paintings explore the relationship between memory, trauma, power, and identity, often focusing on the traces left by political and historical events. I am particularly interested in how monuments, symbols, photographs, and other images can construct collective memory, but also how their meanings can be challenged, disrupted, or reclaimed. By combining disparate imagery through surreal and collage-like compositions, I create narratives that resist a single interpretation.

Symbolism, satire, and ambiguity allow me to examine the contradictions and moral complexities embedded within dominant historical narratives. Recurring themes of authority, violence, corruption, and the persistence of inherited power connect the personal with the political, revealing how unresolved histories continue to inhabit the present.

At the heart of my practice is a desire to question what we think we know: how history is remembered, who controls its representation, what is left out, and how images can open space for alternative stories to emerge.