Martina Matencio photographs the human body as if it already holds the memory of a story. Soft light, small gestures, a subtle tension between vulnerability and strength. Her images linger in the space where beauty and fragility meet.
There was one moment that changed everything. In her early twenties, Matencio spent nights caring for a mentally ill child in a hospital. Manuel was very ill. The commitment was daunting, but she stayed. She remembers noticing how the light fell across his knees and arms. “He was sick but it all looked very beautiful,” she says. “It really got me thinking how something so sad could seem so beautiful to me.”
She took photographs. The room’s glow. The small arcs of bone beneath skin. The brief peace of a child resting. Those images felt like a revelation. “There I realized that there was nothing more human and beautiful than that memory,” she says. “I would say that life put me in front of Manuel so I could learn everything that I now communicate through my photography.”
She remembers noticing how the light fell across his knees and arms.
Matencio now works in Barcelona, but that early experience remains the foundation of her approach. She began her career by photographing clothing for a fashion project she co-created called Luna de Marte. The imagery called for something dreamy and nostalgic and she found her own way of seeing in the process. Natural light became essential. Expression mattered more than pose. The photographs leaned toward emotion over perfection.
Much of her work features female subjects, captured in states of quiet introspection. Their expressions hold contrasts that are difficult to categorize. “Innocence and pain. Pleasure and melancholy,” she says. The feeling she pursues is something like happy sadness. It is a mood that defines her Instagram presence as well, where she works under the name Lalovenenoso, a combination of love and venenoso, Spanish for poisonous.
The tone of her images is unmistakable. Natural light softens bodies into sculptural shapes. Desaturated colors blur past and present. The scenes feel both intimate and distant, a balance she returns to again and again. “I rely on intuition,” she says. “I almost always end up improvising and letting myself get carried away by the moment, the space and especially the light. I feel like light gives strength to my images.”
The body is central. It is not a symbol or a metaphor. It is a landscape of detail, every curve and fold chosen with intention. “The unknown,” she says when asked what keeps her interested. “What you do not really see with the naked eye. I like to find parts that the human eye cannot see. I like to find details and spaces in the body.”
Her photographs offer a view of femininity that is complex and unapologetic. She resists the idea that delicacy equals weakness. Strength, in her work, is often quiet. It appears in the way a figure accepts the light as it lands, or how a gesture reveals more than a face ever could. “For me, every body, all bodies are beautiful,” she says. “I feel like I show it in small parts and, in the end, they all create some sort of map with all my images.”
At the heart of it is memory. Matencio is always aware that a photograph freezes what would otherwise disappear. “I remember the first job I did professionally and I remember thinking this was the best decision I have made in my life,” she says. “Step by step I have been growing and evolving and gaining more experience, but my main starting point comes from that essence.”
Her work continues to circle back to that hospital room: the light, the stillness, and the realization that beauty often exists where it is least expected. Through her lens, the human body becomes a place where sorrow and tenderness can coexist, and where a fleeting moment can last.
From the LYFSTYL original series - “In Focus.”
Follow Martina Matencio journey on Instagram here.
Words by Braeden Alexander.