José Jun Martínez: At the centre there is a stillness

Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present José Jun Martínez: At the centre there is a stillness, the Puerto Rican artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening during London Gallery Weekend 2026. The gallery will host an exhibition walkthrough with the artist on Saturday, 6 June at 5.00pm, and will be open Saturday 11am-6pm and Sunday 12-5pm for London Gallery Weekend.

Bringing together a new body of monumental paintings made in London and informed by years of immersion within the tropical river landscapes of Puerto Rico, the exhibition reflects on return, estrangement, and the unstable space between memory and perception. Martínez approaches painting not as description, but as a form of bodily encounter. Rivers, dense vegetation, rainfall, humidity, and shifting light are translated into fractured compositions where electric ultramarines, acid greens, earthy browns, and synthetic flashes of colour pulse between figuration and dissolution. The works emerge from what the artist describes as the contradictory sensation of returning to a landscape that feels at once intimately familiar and suddenly strange.

Central to the exhibition is a series of large-scale diptychs and triptychs in which an intense ultramarine blue moves across the surface like both water and apparition. For Martínez, colour itself carries psychological and political charge. Drawn partly from the contested blues of the Puerto Rican flag, the paintings hold competing emotional registers of belonging and displacement. Branches and leaves repeatedly cut across the compositions, obstructing clear vision and destabilising perspective. Rather than presenting landscape as something distant or fixed, Martínez constructs immersive sensory environments shaped by sound, rainfall, bodily disorientation, and overstimulation. Influenced by the writings of Heraclitus and by reflections on “re-entry” after distance or exile, the paintings meditate on the impossibility of returning unchanged, asking how both land and self continue to transform through time.

José Jun Martínez (b. 1992, Bayamón, Puerto Rico) is a London-based painter whose work explores the intersections of landscape, memory, and perception. He received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, where he was awarded the Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize in 2024. Martínez first gained recognition through his participation in the 2da Gran Bienal Tropical (Puerto Rico, 2016), curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, and later participated in the Second Biennial of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Donde el Sol se Refugia (Adhesivo Contemporary, Mexico City, 2026), Perennial Paroxysm (Ordovas, London, 2025), The Hymn of the Toads (Matt Carey-Williams, London, 2025), and Hermano de las Flores (Museo de San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2025). He was also shortlisted for the Chadwell Award and is emerging as one of the most promising voices of a new generation of Caribbean painters.

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