Sculptural bench, a 2023 follow-up edition of the furniture series Shi Ho, by Julio Martínez Barnetche. A beautiful piece of carved ashwood it set into a carved volcanic stone base. Martinez is a prolific sculptor of precious and semi-precious stones, woods and metals, working between sculpture, furniture and objects. The piece is from a furniture series created in 2014. Shi Ho is a word from the Mazateco language, from the area of Oaxaca, meaning a 'union'. The artist often takes his materials as he encounters them naturally and does not intervene too much, especially in the case of stones and wood. He never cuts a tree, he finds the wood in nature, in the garden of friends or at architectural salvage sites.

The direct stone carvers belong to a genre that is disappearing. Julio Martínez Barnetche's work is a display of technical mastery combined with creative fluidity that reveals the aesthetics hidden, buried in the crystalline structure of the stone. Recognized in the first decade of the 21st century as a pioneer in direct carving of precious stones, Julio Martínez Barnetche continues to push the three-dimensional limits of modernism to new levels.

Julio Martínez Barnetche plays with the limitless color formations of nature and the plasticity of figurative and non-objective forms, revealed through his chiseling and carving of large jade and other stones. His forms, in some cases, evoke creatures resembling small microorganisms and plants submerged underwater, while others indicate various shapes—some recognizable and others left to the imagination. This leaves us with a wide range of interpretation between the known and the unknown.