Heliogravure on copper plate, marble fragments, equilibrum
32 X 28 X 25 cm
Andrea Martínez
Andrea Martínez is a photo-based artist and educator working in Mexico City. A graduate of La Esmeralda, her practice explores light, materiality, and the photographic image, often pairing photographs with stone fragments to create subtle tensions between what the camera sees and what exists in the world. The result is an ongoing inquiry into photography's conventions and the limits of what an image can hold.
In the Words of the Artist
Silver gelatin prints on resin paper, marble fragments, steel base
21.5 X 28 X 3.8 cm
Collage, for me, is more of a thinking process rather than a medium or a technique. I feel it relates directly to the way my mind works when I am trying to construct an idea, in the sense that it brings together images, experiences, references, creating friction and tension between different materialities, but also between more abstract concepts that otherwise wouldn't be able to coexist.
Somehow, I feel that it is a very permissive process of thinking, because it allows a space of possibility for ideas that wouldn't necessarily make sense together. And in those new relationships, new questions arise and enable you to understand some things better or have clearer ideas.
Silver gelatin prints on resin paper, marble fragments, steel base
36 X 28 X 3.8 cm
I have identified two specific moments in my creative process. There’s the one that involves traveling, placing myself in different types of contexts, taking photographs, and creating a wide archive of images to work with. For this part of my process, I like searching for artist residencies, mostly in rural places, so that I can have direct access to the landscape around and the time to concentrate and explore both the place I am at and the images I start to create. Rituals then involve creating a routine, researching, writing, defining routes, and walking very long distances.
Once I come back to Mexico City, my studio time has more to do with understanding what to do with all those images. Post production, editing, printing, choosing materials, deciding scales... lots of computer time. It is a much less seductive part of the process, but at the same time, it is where the pieces take shape, and the ideas are concluded. I just recently installed a dark room, so now I can add that kind of ritual to my daily studio time, which is exciting.
Heliogravure on copper plate, marble fragments, equilibrum
22 X 32 X 18 cm
Silver gelatin print on resin paper, marble fragments, steel base
24 X 18 X 4 cm
These pieces are supposed to be permanently constructed, but the truth is that every time I assemble one of them, I feel the need to change it, even if it is just a little bit. Sometimes I just arrange the angles or the distances between the parts, or rotate one of the stones to a position that feels a better fit to the piece. But if I don´t feel completely satisfied with the set, I sometimes change the photograph for another image or cut the stone in a different shape... I like the idea of them having small variations; sometimes it’s a success, but other times, I ruin them.
Silver gelatin print on fiber paper, marble fragments, steel base
21 X 25.5 X 3.8 cm
All of my practice has to do with my interest in photography. So I suppose that the photographic image is the one thing that, as an object or as an idea, has become a constant in my studio. In recent times, along with black and white analog experimentation, I began to incorporate different types of materialities, such as stone fragments.
I think it happened as a response to the need for a more physical approach to my process and to the execution of my ideas. In doing so, these new materials allowed me to add new questions and problems that may correspond to other mediums, but when seen through a photographic afterthought, enriched my way of understanding photography, its conventions, and its materiality.
Silver gelatin prints on resin paper, marble fragments, steel base
18 X 36 X 3.8 cm
About the Artist
Andrea Martínez is a Mexican artist and educator whose work investigates light as idea, matter, and material. Working from the fundamentals of photography, she moves light, color, and assumptions about the image into a zone of subtle mismatch — between what we see and what was in front of the camera.
Martínez graduated from ENPEG La Esmeralda and has been a fellow of Mexico's National System of Art Creators since 2021. In 2024, she published Where are you, light?, a collaboration with Susana Santoyo under Piedra Ediciones.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
ALEX DORFSMAN is a Mexico City photographer whose work constructs three-dimensional collages from printed ephemera, exploring nostalgia for times and places beyond lived experience.
FABIOLA MENCHELLI is a Mexico City artist working at the edge of photography and sculpture. Using darkroom chemistry, camera-less processes, and folded photosensitive paper, she transforms light into tactile, abstract objects that challenge the limits of the medium.
GABRIEL DE LA MORA is a Mexico City artist whose practice transforms discarded materials, eggshells, feathers, butterfly wings, and shoe soles into precise, monochrome-like surfaces that interrogate painting, time, and the role of the artist.
OMAR BARQUET is a Chetumal-born, Mexico City-based artist working across painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and performance. Trained at La Esmeralda, his wide-ranging practice draws on language, myth, and material experimentation.
ANDRÉS GAMIOCHIPI is a Mexico City artist working in collage and painting. A co-founder of the analogue collective Mexicollage, his surrealist-inflected work layers images across time, building dense visual fields from found sources and obsessive accumulation.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection
Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library, discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s rigorous engagement with it, and four instances of its little-known role in the history of art making.
▼ VISIT
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Fondazione Prada
Curated by Nancy Spector, the first sustained dialogue between Jafa and Prince. Fifty-plus works across the palazzo's two floors, videos, paintings, photographs, sculpture, pairing two artists who have built careers on taking images that belong to other people.
▼ LISTEN
Special Sound Selection: The Word by Shigeo Sekito
Japanese synthesist Shigeo Sekito recorded this album in the mid-70s for Toshiba's mood music library. Oscillating between easy listening and pure abstraction, it sounds like a lost transmission from a better future.
