Field of Power looks at the city as a living surface where political, social, and historical narratives compete. Martinat extracts paintings, inscriptions, symbols, and materials from urban walls, preserving images that were meant to disappear. Removed from their original sites and placed in the gallery, these fragments retain the marks of time while taking on a new, independent presence. They become palimpsests: material remains of what a society has tried to assert, transform, or forget.

The title carries particular meaning in Houston, home to the Rothko Chapel and closely connected to Mark Rothko’s legacy and the Color Field tradition. Martinat moves the idea of the “field” beyond painting and into public space. In his work, city walls become fields of power where images, speeches, and ideologies overlap, disappear, and struggle to remain visible. The exhibition connects Houston’s artistic history with a political reading of the surface as a place of memory, conflict, and change.

The works in this exhibition begin with electoral propaganda painted on walls in Lima. Political parties paint over public and private surfaces, often without permission; campaigns overlap and erase one another; some images survive outdoors for years, while others fade with time or are erased by residents sick of them. Behind this visual disorder lies a more lasting structure: in a country that has had nine heads of state between 2016 and 2026, power does not change at the pace of its faces – the same forces negotiate and form alliances in Congress in order to remain. Each work is shown from both sides. On the front, a black field covers the original propaganda and can be viewed as an abstract painting; on the reverse, a surviving letter remains visible. Distributed throughout the gallery, however, the letters no longer form a readable message: the original text has not been destroyed – it has become illegible through separation. What was meant to stay hidden returns on the side that was never intended to be seen.

These works examine covering as a political act. Erasing a slogan does not remove its history; instead, it creates a new image and leaves evidence of an effort to censor, replace, or exclude it from collective memory. What they reveal is not the censorship of a single authority, but a system that continually erases itself: every campaign covers the previous one without ever fully making it disappear – a system that endlessly changes its face so that, underneath, nothing has to change.

Through Field of Power, the ruin becomes more than a symbol of destruction or nostalgia. It becomes an active territory where the contradictions of history can be read, and where images continue to survive even after they have been denied.