Strong geometric images in his paintings reflect Venezuelan artist Cipriano Martinez’s initial training as a civil engineer and his experience of working in his uncle’s print shop in Caracas.  They depict the conflicting urban landscape of cities where engineers and architects seek to impose a rigorous order but the overall effect is a chaotic assembly of high rise buildings, roads and pavements where the landscape and the people refuse to be tamed and bring fractures and new geometries to the precise arrangements being imposed, a metaphor also for the conflict between order and chaos, between wealth and poverty and between dictatorship and freedom which exists in many urban concentrations in the 21^st century.

The New York-based rug producer Vanderhurd and Martinez have collaborated on a series of nine rugs derived from Martinez’s paintings which are display in the Maddox Gallery in London along with several of his paintings.  Martinez’s bold images have been translated into silk, with some technical adjustments to enable hand-weaving in India which has made the images larger, bolder and stronger and the rugs could be laid on the floor or hung on walls as works of art in their own right.