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written by Lesley A. Wolff

When considering the work of Los Angeles artist Patrick Martinez, I am reminded of the famous photograph Parábola Optica [Optical Parable] (1931) by Mexican photographer Manuel Álvaraz Bravo (1902-2002). In figure 1, an optician’s shop signage that reads “La Optica Moderna” [The modern optic] comprises the entirety of the composition, allegorizing the layers of visuality that configure the urban sensorial landscape. In Bravo’s photograph, the viewer is positioned as an urban flaneur, gazing up at the shop signage and its rendering of the human eye from below, but with the disconcerting realization that the image has somehow been reversed, and the known world rendered as an uncanny simulacrum. Bravo’s composition amplifies and challenges the newfound power of the lens in the early twentieth century as a tool capable of shaping and shifting our field of vision. In so doing, Bravo frames the modern cityscape as a site layered with visuality—a nebulous force that is at once beyond sensory perception and wholly prescribed according to its will.

Like Bravo’s “eye,” a motif articulating the condition of modernity in the photographer’s hometown of Mexico City, Martinez invokes his own visual vernacular to memorialize overlooked urban communities, spaces, and rituals in his native city of Los Angeles. Works such as Cake and Roses (2019; Figure 2) layer palpable remnants of fictive and found signage—the detritus of urban life—transforming the assemblage into a portal to the L.A. streetscape, replete with urban density’s competing claims to space and visibility. For Martinez, cake and roses are two oft-repeated motifs that appear across his decades-long career, quietly and organically integrated into his compositions as if they hide in plain sight. Nonetheless, Martinez’s insistence on their presence in his works seems revealing of the artist’s attitudes toward the city’s palimpsestic cycles of celebration and grief. His ceramic roses offer a simulacrum of the conventional, store-bought fondant or buttercream renderings of the flower, which are themselves simulacra of actual roses, and his sculptural, painted cakes, modeled atop a wooden panel and a gold Plexi mirror that evokes the cake boards of a local bakery, offer a similar play on presence, absence, and the intersection of the two. Cakes and roses thus become vanitas meditations on life and death in Martinez’s oeuvre, amplifying those ways in which interpersonal bonds become imbricated through festivity and mourning. We come together over cake in times of tragedy and triumph, and we extend roses to one another when offering our love or regrets to those both alive and deceased. These rituals shape urban life, puncturing the monotony of time by bearing witness to one’s community. Importantly, it is often émigré communities who bolster this ritual economy through their tireless yet unseen labor as bakers and florists as well as the communal gatherings and practices that constitute L.A.’s urban rhythm.

Martinez explores these dynamics in-depth in his ongoing series of work, begun in 2013, known as the Sheet Cake Paintings. Each mixed media painting depicts an individual’s portrait atop the trompe l’oeil simulacrum of a sheet cake. These paintings have espoused various thematics over the years, but primarily feature portraits of individuals who have been formative to civic justice movements, be they writers, poets, activists, carceral survivors, or police brutality victims (Figures 3-4). The works are sumptuous, and layered in coats of heavy body acrylic paint that emulate the “body” of a thick buttercream frosting, taking up space in ways that challenge the limiting confines of painting as a medium. These works pay homage to the luscious, impasto vedutas of cake displays by American painter Wayne Thiebaud (1921-2021), whose textures Martinez riffs on with the tools and methods evocative of the artist’s own encounters with the city. Atop the modeled cake, the portrait emulates the photographic transfers and airbrush techniques used by bakers and artists alike. Martinez’s practice thus bridges the everyday, if invisible, spheres of urban production that link graffiti art and cake baking to the high value art market. In so doing, Martinez’s series provokes new questions about how eating and foodways are tethered to urban visibility. As static art objects, Martinez’s portraits evoke a stillness that seems counter to the conviviality that we associate with a sheet cake; yet this cognitive dissonance, between the celebratory yet ephemeral presence of cake—which is meant to be obliterated, eaten, and digested—and the close, quiet looking that a painting or sculpture demands, cultivates a new kind of intimacy, allowing for the subject depicted to be truly seen, and for the fictions and desires of visuality to be readily disclosed.

In the context of racialized and minoritized bodies, eating is often framed as a violent act, as something obliterating and destructive. Enslaved labor—from which valuable foodstuffs such as sugar, rum, and molasses were cultivated and wealth amassed in the West—stripped individuals of their sovereignty, coercing the perpetuation of consumptive systems by people “who were themselves consumed in the creation of wealth.” Food thus became entangled with the perils of racialized hierarchies, yielding dehumanized depictions of non-white bodies used to sell foodstuffs to white aspirational consumers, categorically distinguishing “fine dining” from “ethnic cuisine,” and condemning minoritized communities to live amid food deserts where basic nutrition comes at a premium. In my research on the intersections of food and art, I lean on the commanding words of bell hooks: “It is by eating the Other…that one asserts power and privilege.” U.S. consumer practices and the visual landscape have been crafted in the image of racial bodies commoditized as “resources for pleasure,” rendering them marginalized and fetishized. Martinez’s work acknowledges the critical frameworks laid out by hooks and others, but he ultimately addresses this racialized and oppressive history through the suggestion of reverential, not possessive, eating; in short, rather than couching food (specifically cake) within a discourse of terror and subjugation, he reframes his subjects to become operative agents of historical revision through inclusive love, meditation, and celebration.

Martinez’s radical approach to power, privilege, and pleasure in U.S. foodways can be located in the very first of the artist’s sheet cake paintings, a portrait of Tupac Shakur entitled Happy Birthday Makeveli (Tupac Shakur) (Figure 5), inspired by a home video of the deceased rapper’s final birthday in 1996. The grainy footage shows Shakur being served a birthday cake elaborately decorated with his portrait; yet the figure on the cake shows no resemblance to Shakur’s likeness save for the fact that the figure on the cake appears to be Black (though even his skin tone does not resemble the rapper’s). Today, this footage stands as a commentary on the tragedy of Shakur’s inability to be truly seen as a Black man and as someone doubly removed from his own image as a Black rapper in the public eye.

In 2013, the same year that Black Lives Matter was founded, Martinez revisits and revises the rapper’s last birthday, producing his own version of the sheet cake, but with attention to the indexicality of Shakur’s social presence. The cool purples and blues airbrushed onto the cake lend an angelic aura to the rapper’s likeness. Martinez’s piped shells and white border that run along the work’s rectangular perimeter reveal a deliberately imprecise hand that cares little for the preciousness of the cake, its hurried action perhaps a nod to the mass production of these products; yet unlike the original cake that inspired this work, Martinez’s portrait of Tupac Shakur is rendered with great care, depth, and realism, from the kindness and intensity in his eyes to the gleam on his silver chain. In contrast to the dark history of racialized eating in the U.S., Martinez’s approach takes on a markedly spiritual tone, speaking not from a space of fraught desire and commoditization, but rather the ritual of communion.

Absence also permeates these works—since Tupac Shakur’s cake was made for his final birthday before he was murdered in a drive-by shooting, it thus stands as a memento mori of the rapper’s mortality. Martinez’s interpretation helps to forge and amplify these connections across the threshold of life and death. As the first portrait in what would become an ongoing series, Martinez’s painting of Tupac Shakur uses vision and consumption not to impose hegemonic relations, but to instead invite intimacy and liberation, rendering the work, and the series that emerged from it, an opening to memory work and communal care.

Through this series, Martinez aligns himself with contemporary Latinx artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié, Joiri Minaya, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, among others, who use sugar as a subversive medium and symbol that harkens back to the violent plantocracies out of which the Americas was economically, materially, and socially forged. This contemporary engagement with sugar in Latinx visual art also alludes to the ways in which the substance, long the caloric engine of the working class, continues to oppress minoritized communities in food insecure circumstances, saddling them with elevated rates of disease and death due to the prevalence of extractive foodways in these spaces. The trauma underscoring the culture and history of sugar persists in Martinez’s work—its critique of the culinary industrial complex unavoidable to the twenty-first century viewer—yet the artist also invites the viewer to find peace, quietude, and celebration within the work.

Through this series, Martinez aligns himself with contemporary Latinx artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié, Joiri Minaya, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, among others, who use sugar as a subversive medium and symbol that harkens back to the violent plantocracies out of which the Americas was economically, materially, and socially forged. This contemporary engagement with sugar in Latinx visual art also alludes to the ways in which the substance, long the caloric engine of the working class, continues to oppress minoritized communities in food insecure circumstances, saddling them with elevated rates of disease and death due to the prevalence of extractive foodways in these spaces. The trauma underscoring the culture and history of sugar persists in Martinez’s work—its critique of the culinary industrial complex unavoidable to the twenty-first century viewer—yet the artist also invites the viewer to find peace, quietude, and celebration within the work.

Throughout his Sheet Cake Paintings, Martinez both centers and commemorates cultural and political leaders of minoritized communities and emulates new ways of visualizing urban networks. He asks us to step back, as he does in so many of his works, from the routinized cacophony of urban life in order to forge new relationships with these everyday spaces and rituals—what scholar Anita Mannur calls “non-normative intimacies,” a phrase encompassing the deliberate challenge to dominant relations through the forging of new paths for emotional proximity and presence. Mannur claims, “Every act of eating with others, or alone, is a form of intimacy.” Eating, she writes, “establishes a form of kinship that refuses to be contained by narratives of heteronormativity. Therein lies the potential for radical intimacies to emerge.” In Martinez’s work we are invited into a radically intimate space where cake becomes a cultural broker for social and political belonging. Even more, we can never ingest the cake that Martinez offers. There will always be a separation, a gap, between subject and viewer, between consumer and consumed, between desire and actualization. Martinez harnesses the potency of sensory encounters and deprivation with the taste never realized on the tongue and the emptiness lingering in the belly; and in this moment of hunger, he shows us how to see. Martinez asks us to fill this space—typically full of the frenzied affect of convivial or comforted eating—with the closeness and stillness of sitting, being, and looking. In this way, Martinez unlocks new possibilities for connection that circumvents the destruction, horror, and racialization that has long defined the consumption (gustatory, visual, or otherwise) of minoritized communities and individuals in this country.

Martinez thus depicts his subjects not as products for our consumption, but as part of a relational network of makers, thinkers, and activists. Their portrait, their presence, is indeed fictitious, but by rendering their likeness onto the uncanny surface of his cakes, Martinez willingly reveals the optical illusion. As Álvarez Bravo’s image of the optician’s shop reveals the competing realities reflected and cultivated by the camera lens, so too does Martinez lay bare the relational dynamics that shape our field of vision in urban life today; such knowledge, in turn, opens and empowers new potentialities. Martinez usually demands that we, the viewer, meet the gaze of his subjects, looking at figures such as César Chávez, bell hooks, or Tupac Shakur squarely in the eye. Yet in so doing, we must confront the realization that this superficial visage exists only as deep as the surface of this painted “cake.” These portraits are not meant to make their subjects known; rather, they show the viewer how to contemplate and celebrate the unknowability, and thus the shared humanity, of these individuals. Instead of devouring their likeness, we are asked to hold space for their collective presence, to meet their gaze and acknowledge how intimacy can be forged even in their absence, and to reimagine community through stillness.