Fascinated by Renaissance painting, French artist Ronald Martinez has been developing a collection of photographic work over the last ten years that captures the mystery, depth and striking contrasts of the chiaroscuro masters. The models’ nudity and the references to classical art’s religious and secular themes further blur the boundary between photography and painting, without ever indulging in pastiche.

Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro influence is undoubtedly the first thing you’ll see when viewing Ronald Martinez’s compositions. The artist speaks passionately about the effect that paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, José de Ribera and Johannes Vermeer have on him. Nus Divins: Hommage à la Peinture Italienne, (Divine Nudes: A Tribute to Italian Painting) puts into context what has been the backdrop to his artistic creation over the last ten years. His photographs echo 16th- and 17th-century painting, not by reproducing its masterpieces, but by drawing on their pictorial, symbolic and thematic vocabulary. Images of the Virgin and Child, the Descent from the Cross and the Pieta, a Medusa head or Venus in a mirror come to mind, expressing a type of representation rather than a particular painting. The same applies to chiaroscuro. Nurtured by his study of the masters’ paintings of this genre, Ronald Martinez expertly reproduces the modeling of light and shadows, a depth of black and subtlety of contrasts on bodies gently emerging from the half-light. He photographs in total darkness, moving and directing a single light source until achieving this aesthetic quality. The photographer speaks of this search as a secret or a mathematical enigma he is trying to unravel. The artist’s photography captures the moment, beginning each session with a blank page and no post-production processing. He aims to reveal the emotion that exists in the intensity of the moment with honesty, simply through the battle of light against darkness. This is where his photographs touch on the sacred. The nudity of the bodies standing out against the darkness takes us back both to our primitive condition and to the circumstances of our coming into the world. Their beauty, imbued with both strength and fragility, is no longer based solely on the physical characteristics of the models, but is a universal beauty in which it is for each of us, just like the artist, to seek to reveal.