Collection: At Least for a Moment
Rómulo Martínez
Curated by Marco Caridad
On view: October 3–24, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, October 3 · 6–9 PM
Mundo Arte Gallery
1746 NE 163rd St, North Miami Beach, FL 33162
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In a present marked by the incessant circulation of images, discourses, and technologies that shape our perceptions and behaviors, there is a need to pause, even if it is only for a moment, to reconnect with our own selves. The exhibition AT LEAST FOR A MOMENT is conceived as a space for pause and reflection, inviting the viewer to detach themselves from daily demands—work, family, the urban dynamic—and embark on an introspective journey into intimate and profound territories of thought and emotion.
This exhibition project presents a new body of work in which the artist explores himself from an open and allegorical perspective, intertwining the autobiographical with the collective. The pieces, created using drawing and painting techniques on canvas, recreate landscapes and urban environments where natural, artificial, and human elements coexist. The application of color takes on a symbolic character, giving each composition a poetic narrative that seeks to resonate with the viewer's sensibility.
The exhibition is structured around canvases of various sizes and compositional installations that generate a dialogue between the intimate and the expansive. This visual dynamic proposes a journey that oscillates between personal contemplation and openness to the collective, inviting each visitor to construct their own aesthetic and emotional experience.
AT LEAST FOR A MOMENT not only exhibits images but also presents a gesture: pausing, looking inward, and returning transformed. In times of uncertainty and unease, art here becomes a bridge to beauty, understanding, and the possibility of change. The exhibition is conceived as a call to the will to explore, to briefly inhabit a space of introspection, and to return with new resolutions for life.
CURATORIAL TEXT
There are territories we inhabit as if they were our own, and yet they never quite stop feeling provisional.
In At Least for a Moment, Rómulo Martínez builds a cartography of that condition. Migratory birds, male bodies, feathers, hands, feet, landscapes without precise coordinates, and sources of light run through compositions where moving does not simply mean changing place. It means learning to recognize oneself when the cultural, emotional, and social coordinates that once organized identity have shifted.
Martínez structures this passage through a precise chromatic grammar. Blue belongs to thought and air; magenta returns experience to the flesh and the heart; violet appears where the two fields meet. Yellow is space, the star, light: knowledge and understanding, the kind we often never fully grasp. Gray is the neutral space, the interval where nothing has been decided yet. And green, just a touch, breaks in as an anomaly. Color does not describe the world: it organizes different ways of inhabiting it.
The birds in these works are migratory. Their flight holds freedom, but also orientation, necessity, and survival. Like them, the subject who migrates learns to build belonging while remaining aware of their condition of transit. In the artist's own words, there is something of being "borrowed" in another territory.
Martínez's urban and natural landscapes are minimalist and lack precise geographic coordinates. They could belong to the place of origin or the place of arrival, to a here or a there. This spatial ambiguity is central to the exhibition: it allows a territory to be recognized without being fully located, just as migrant belonging can feel close, multiple, and provisional all at once.
The exhibition asks what happens to identity when the system that recognizes it changes. Which signs remain legible. Which acquire new meanings. What part of ourselves we manage to name, and what part is named by others.
At Least for a Moment does not propose to resolve the migrant experience. It proposes to inhabit its contradiction: to belong and to remain in transit at the same time.
Marco Caridad, curator
Interdisciplinary Artist