Daniel Joseph Martinez

If You Drink Hemlock, I Shall Drink It With You

or

A Beautiful Death; player to player, pimp to pimp.

(As performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade)

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present a new installation by Daniel Joseph Martinez. "If You Drink Hemlock, I Shall Drink It With You or A Beautiful Death; player to player, pimp to pimp. (As performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade)" is an immersive environment referencing Jacques-Louis David's seminal portrait The Death of Marat (1793). Whereas David's painting represents a single moment, Martinez's interpretation is conceived as a mise en scène, constantly oscillating between past and present.

The creation of David's Death of Marat involved three individuals: the victim represented in the picture, the assassin Charlotte Corday, and the painter; in Martinez's work there are four characters embodied by the artist: Marat, Corday, Martinez's voiceover, and Martinez himself. The convergence of these figures on one stage as constructed by Martinez is not simply total theatre, but emerges as a prism through which to examine the nature of revolutions, power, and abuses underlying contemporary democratic principles.

For more than 30 years, Los Angeles-born artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957) has been honing his politically-inflected practice, which critic Jeffrey Kastner has characterized as "unapologetically prob[ing] uncomfortable issues of personal and collective identity, seeking out threadbare spots in the fabric of conventional wisdom." Martinez's practice takes the form of photography, painting, site-specific installation, printed works, performance and public interventions to question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference.