Rica Fuentes Martinez: When Spores Become Constellations
First a whisper, then a swarm. In Rica Fuentes Martinez’s ink drawings, spores unfurl like constellations and cellular filaments braid into quiet storms.
“Her drawings do not illustrate science. They slow it down until it becomes feeling.”
The paper does not hold an image so much as a living rhythm, microscopic architectures suspended between fragility and insistence.
Rica Fuentes Martinez: Detail from watercolor and ink on handmade cotton paper, Vienna. The precision reveals how she intertwines myth, science, and overlooked voices into a living tree of knowledge and memory. Images courtesy the artist.
From Barcelona to Vienna: A Studio Between Lab and Poem
Born in Barcelona and based in Vienna, Fuentes Martinez works where the lab meets the studio.
She translates the micro-real, the realm of fungi, protozoa, and plant tissues, into visual systems that read like scores for breath: precise, patient, and tender.
Rica Fuentes Martinez: On the left: “Yersinia Pestis II” (2022) and “Yersinia Pestis III” (2023) Pencil and ink on paper, each 30 x 40 cm. Yersinia Pestis III maps a dense network of anatomical pathways and chemical notations layered over spectral human figures. It evokes the clinical precision of medical diagrams while allowing plague histories to seep through as ghostly presences. Images courtesy the artist.
Her training may not be laboratory bound, yet her gaze is forensic and her sensibility is poetic.
Over years she has built a practice that treats the unseen not as metaphor, but as responsibility.
Deep Dive
Look closely. Each drawing assembles its own ecology: filaments repeat with slight deviations, membranes swell and thin, voids carry as much weight as line.
Rica Fuentes Martinez: "Mikropilz" Watercolor and ink on paper. Organic forms emerge as abstract anatomical structures, reduced to line, circle, and shimmering color. Images courtesy the artist.
From afar you might see pattern.
Up close, you see negotiation.
This is the work’s charge: to hold contradiction without collapse.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
All you need to know: Parallel Vienna at your fingertips.
Fungi can heal and harm.
Microbes nourish and injure.
Beauty is not consolation, it is evidence.
Martinez renders these tensions with an economy of means, ink, paper, repetition, so that form carries the ethics.
Nothing shouts.
Precision, here, is care.
Rica Fuentes Martinez: “Modular Mix I” (2024) by Fuentes Martinez Watercolor and watercolor with special effects on textured specialty paper, 42 x 59.4 cm, Vienna. Shown here alongside its preparatory sketch, the work reveals how Fuentes Martinez builds her compositions from precise line studies into luminous layers of color and texture. Images courtesy the artist.
What lingers is her pacing.
The smallest units carry the largest questions.
She favors modular constellations rather than didactic diagrams, soft systems that build by accretion: dot, line, veil.
The page becomes a field where a thousand almost identical decisions accumulate into difference.
It is rigorous, yet never rigid.
In the negative space you glimpse time: the hours of looking, the small corrections, the refusal to let speed decide.
The Politics of the Unseen
Fuentes Martinez occupies a rare middle register between art and science spectacle and purely formal abstraction.
Rica Fuentes Martinez: On the left: Systemrelevant – Solo exhibition by Rica Fuentes Martinez at WUK Vienna, supported by the Evolutionsbibliothek im WUK. On the right: On the right side you see a photo of her solo exhibition (2025) “The Invisible Gender – A Stocktaking” at Atlas Wien.
She declines techno theatrics and avoids didactic moralizing.
Instead she offers a visual ethics of attention: how we look at what sustains us, how we narrate what we rarely see, and how power hides in the invisible, from microbes to gendered labor to uncounted data.
Her drawings do not explain biology.
They restore its intimacy.
In a culture of acceleration, this slowness is not nostalgic.
It is a decision and a position.
Learning to See What Keeps Us Alive
If the planet has a handwriting, it may look like this: delicate, systemic, contradictory, and alive.
Fuentes Martinez reminds us that care begins at scales we must relearn to see.
Upcoming exhibition:
Her next exhibition will take place as part of the Pilzfestspiele (October 6–12, 2025), which are being held in Vienna for the second time.
Curious about microfungi in art? Tap to follow Pilzfestspiele and catch Spotted! at Viktoria.
Titled Spotted!, the show will be presented at Viktoria (15th district, Viktoriagasse 5), an association for artistic research and social design.
As part of the program, Martinez will also give an artist talk on the microfungi that she has painted, connecting her drawings directly to the subject matter of the festival.
Discover more Rica Fuentes Martinez on Instagram who Bridges art and science through intricate ink and watercolor.
Discover more works, exhibitions, and research directly on the artist’s website.
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