Dónde el sol se refugia exhibits a body of new work by Jun Martinez where landscape acts as threshold rather than spectacle. Installed at Adhesivo Contemporary in Mexico City, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive meditation on refuge, on the question of where light withdraws when history feels untenable. The title, translated as “Where the Sun Takes Refuge,” is less metaphor than proposition. It suggests that light is not extinguished in dark times; it relocates.
Martinez, born in Bayamón and now based in London, paints Puerto Rico from a distance that is neither nostalgic nor detached. Instead, distance sharpens. The Caribbean light that once saturated his canvases now reemerges through heightened chromatic intensity with acidic yellows, insurgent blues, and passages of near-violent contrast. These are ideological colors. The pale blue that recurs throughout the series invokes the lighter blue of the Puerto Rican flag associated with resistance to colonial assimilation. In this context, color becomes both atmosphere and argument.
The exhibition’s large-scale horizontal works, particularly the expansive Dónde el sol se refugia XIV (2026), operate almost architecturally, enclosing the viewer within bands of luminous yellow that read as both horizon and incision. The sun appears as a reflection, reclining across water, fractured by texture. Martinez’s surfaces are restless with their scraped, layered, partially erased gestures. From a distance, they shimmer with seduction, but up close, they register abrasion. Beauty and violence coexist materially. Paint is applied, removed, and reworked until the surface bears witness to its own instability.
Crucially, the series lacks the existence of figures. Yet the human presence is inescapable. Martinez rejects the colonial convention of landscape as distant survey. His paintings are made from what he describes as an internal landscape formed through years of immersion in Puerto Rican terrain. The viewer is not positioned as conqueror, but as inhabitant. The land is not a backdrop; it is a protagonist.
What emerges in Dónde el sol se refugia is a disciplined act of contemplation. Martinez creates a space where darkness is acknowledged without surrendering the possibility of light. The sun rests between concealment and return, just as the exhibition insists that refuge, too, can be radiant. —Charles Moore
