After a successful run, FB gallery invites you to the closing reception for Rodrigo Martins, the first solo exhibition in New York by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Martins. His paintings and drawings are both viscerally monumental and challenging. They are unusually complex for an artist of his age, and his pieces are filled with intellectual and formal references to canonic artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Martins’ representations are akin to Bacon’s in their tortured dualism, and his imagery of anxiety and alienation. His representation of a gorilla, for example, references Bacon’s study of “The Screaming Pope” to denote the contemporary anxieties of Martins’ generation. Yet, these large scale pieces are not only dystopian and dark; the vibrance of the colors and the composition is playful and warm. The young artist describes his work as visceral articulations that go beyond representation. The flesh of Martins’ animal canvases are reminiscent of Lucien Freud. His contemporary gaze creates compositions that are in constant dialogue with themselves, but they engage the viewer into a plethora of mysterious narratives. The European influences are visible, but Rodrigo Martins’ paintings and drawings are in another sense like the literary works of magical realism, with a certain non-linearity between each piece and within the compositions.