A work by Gabo Martinez
With an exhibition title that sounds like the name of a retro horror film, The Sun Rises at Midnight at Pablo Cardoza Gallery brings together multimedia works by Gabo Martinez and Manik Raj Nakra, artists who share unexpected overlaps between media and dimensions.
The show presents new directions from Martinez. While the artist still incorporates some patterned sgraffito carving into the surface of her terracotta vessels, her colors are decidedly more muted, and her designs are more contained. The clay surface is now left largely unadorned or is molded with soft spike forms that resemble horns or cactus thorns. Notably, Martinez’s works are now mostly unglazed, allowing us to appreciate the warm, earthy texture of her terracotta pieces without the glassified sheen that coated them in the past. Rather than reflecting light, these pieces seem to possess an inner luminosity of their own.
Gabo Martinez, “Fertility Goddess,” 2024
Gabo Martinez, “Fertility Goddess,” 2024
Martinez’s works are also more explicitly rooted in historical pottery traditions. When I interviewed the artist for Glasstire in 2019, she said that she was “deeply influenced by Indigenous Mexican and Native American art,” and those influences are at the forefront of a new group of ceramic figures. Fertility Goddess (2024) is painted with designs reminiscent of the pottery of the Chupícuaro, an ancient civilization from the artist’s native Guanajuato. Indeed, the words “Chupícuaro” and “Guanajuato” are written around the figure’s ankles, as if the piece is a sort of archaeological replica or a handmade souvenir. Nearby, Zoquitl Worker Effigy (2025) is a female figure-vessel clasping her hands beneath a prominent red heart. Zoquitl means ‘clay’ in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs that is still spoken widely today. Likewise, this piece seems to be a sort of self-portrait by an artist who is working in the vibrant spaces between the past and the present.
A woodblock print by Gabo Martinez
These sturdy, earthbound vessels are a strong counterpoint to Martinez’s breezy woodblock prints, which float well above eye level on the gallery walls. In these works, colorful flowers and star shapes repeat themselves over thin white mulberry paper. Some of the designs mirror the forms that are carved into the surfaces of the artist’s clay works, but here they are as light as air, and feel more overtly decorative. Careful carving has created both sets of images, but their substrates ultimately impart the works with their sense of gravity.
Nakra’s paintings feature animal claws and jaws poised before vast, acid-colored landscapes. Curiously, the artist’s tigers, leopards, alligators, and other predators are rendered in relatively flat and glossy oil paint, while his backgrounds are matte and mottled combinations of stained ceramic stucco. The upraised texture of what is theoretically distant space confounds a sense of pictorial dimension and imbues the works with a disconcerting sense of motionlessness. Nakra’s concern with three-dimensionality extends to his pieces’ painted edges, which sometimes also include title texts, as in the large-scale work The Slasher (2023).
A work by Manik Raj Nakra
Like Martinez, Nakra is interested in the deep past. Icarus and the Minotaur are the subjects of a pair of paintings here, evoking Greek mythology and — along with his repeated slasher film references in the show’s other pieces — an ambiguous sense of punishment and peril. But the artist’s narrative powers are most vividly alive on paper. His new artist book The Gloaming (2025) reprises his compelling “Kali Moths” (2022) and “Moonlight, Desire, A Jackal, Sea Serpents, and Me” (2023) series, each made of fascinating mixtures of handmade paper, woodcut prints, and drawings. With its punchy colors and open-ended imagery, Nakra’s new book is a compelling fusion of xerox punk zine aesthetics and South Asian woodblock printmaking (Nakra is a first-generation Indian American). The format feels especially fruitful for an artist who is so invested in the drama of a good story.
The Sun Rises at Midnight: Manik Raj Nakra and Gabo Martinez is on view at Pablo Cardoza Gallery through April 8.
The gallery will host a release reception for Nakra’s zine The Gloaming and an artist talk on April 5 from 6 to 9 p.m.
