Eddie Martinez (artist)

Martinez's first New York solo show at ZieherSmith (2006) presented raw, mixed-media paintings and drawings that critics suggest drew on his immediate environment with an introspective, diaristic focus, creating a dialogue between the external world and the internal syntax of painting.[29][3] They portray a recurring, whimsical cast of wide-eyed figures in hats, parrots and coiled snakes set in incongruous, sometimes fantastical environments dense with vivid pattern and color, spires, towers and rooftops, road signs and potted plants (e.g., Wild Pilgrims, 2005 or Snakesperience, 2006).[3][29][30] Some paintings combine multiple genres (portraiture, still life, allegorical narrative), while others focus on one, as in Mario Situation (2006), which Art In America's David Coggins wrote "reinvigorates the still life … in a spirit of clear-eyed exploration rather than postmodern posturing."[3][29] Critics have compared the energy and approach of Martinez's early (and later) work to the path between drawing and painting pioneered by Cy Twombly.[31][3]

In 2010, New York Times critic Roberta Smith characterized Martinez's evolving style as "a kind of updated, liberated Neo-Expressionism" drawing widely from Picasso, early Peter Saul, Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and David Hockney.[1] Others describe its "kitchen-sink quality"—loaded with ideas, gesture and texture, scattered fields, pileups of shapes and cartoony objects, thick brushstrokes, bursts of paint—as functioning like rebuses or hieroglyphs to create not-quite-decipherable messages.[28] In several paintings of this time, Martinez introduced speech bubbles (Back Looker, 2009) or tabletops (The Grass Is Never Greener, 2009), which serve as framing devices for clustered forms or paintings within paintings, and create space within the compositions.[28][25] Contrasting with the bright cacophony of much of his work, Martinez also explored all-white tableaux with motifs squeezed straight from caulk tubes and all-black canvases with incised images revealing under-layers of coloration (e.g., Bad War).[1][25] Critics likened some of this work, in its appearance and mix of humor and darkness, to the work of Guston and Basquiat.[28][25]

In late 2010, Martinez created the 8-by-28-foot installation The Feast (ZieherSmith, Art Basel Miami Beach), a variation on his table paintings that matched expressionistic painting with Renaissance and Baroque historical themes, depicting a raucous banquet table attended by twelve figures;[32][33][19] it attracted notice after being purchased by collector Charles Saatchi.[22]

In his post-2010 work, Martinez turned toward abstraction.[20][19][7] He made a dramatic shift in the solo show "Matador" (Journal Gallery, 2013), paring down his content to a single composition of four interlocking, bulbous shapes in red, blue, yellow and black, repeated on five 7-by-10-foot white canvases, with slight variations in style, arrangement, and texture.[2][34] The bold color and cartoonish forms recall Miró and Picasso, while the rugged surfaces—viscous oil paint scraped, smudged and attacked with a wide palette knife, housepainter’s brush and disc sander—suggest action painting, complicated by hasty, contemporary bursts of spray paint and banal collaged elements (gum wrappers, baby wipes).[2][35] The show's title linked the processes of painters and matadors, while its focused variations alluded to the orchestrated repetitions of the bullfight, urban signage and serial art.[2][35]

Following that show, Martinez took a hiatus from painting and turned to three-dimensional work: modest abstract sculptures of scavenged found objects, initially combined in ramshackle configurations that he painted brightly or in bronze.[19] He translated them into larger, human-scaled pieces using plaster, Styrofoam and wood planks, which were exhibited at Kohn Gallery (2014).[5][19] That show also featured large gestural, sketchy paintings pared down to airy compositions of colliding, abstract blobby slabs of primary colors (e.g., Perfect Stranger, 2014), that reviews suggest resembled the sculptures.[19][36]

In his shows "Salmon Eye" (2016) and "Cowboy Town" (2017), Martinez returned with amalgamations of abstraction and figuration emphasizing the immediacy and speed of drawings, which were painted with less textural surface build-up and more white space.[6][4][7] They originated as small Sharpie drawings that he enlarged as black silkscreens on canvas, sometimes treating the lines like a blueprint and others times disregarding or obscuring them entirely with oils, enamel, and spray paint.[4][7] Critics suggested the latter show, which featured forms emerging out of chaos (e.g., When We Were in Good Hands, Cowboy Town) reflected a dystopian response to the contemporary U.S. sociopolitical climate.[37][38]

Martinez attracted institutional recognition in the latter 2010s, with five museum solo shows in three years.[21] His first, "Ants at a Picknic" at the Davis Museum (2017), presented a new series of large-scale mandala paintings, painted bronze tabletop sculptures and large framed drawings.[39] In the paintings, the mandalas serve as containers for shapes and marks, much like his earlier table works; based on small drawings that he enlarged, they highlight Martinez's command of linework.[40] His immersive, four-wall, salon-style exhibition at The Drawing Center the same year recreated the wall of abstract drawings—done at home and in the world—accruing in his studio over several years.[41][11] It ultimately comprised roughly two thousand drawings (many swapped in throughout the show), from idle, automatic-drawing doodles to painting studies; some of his paintings were hung over them to highlight the connections between the two mediums.[41][11]

In his Bronx Museum show, "White Outs" (2018), Martinez reversed course from his typically colorful work by focusing on a process of erasure in which he intentionally blotted out silkscreened drawing forms with varying shades of white.[10][42] The resulting, large-scale works, characterized by ghostly shapes, occasional bursts of colors and rich textures, suggested a simulated snowstorm (whiteout) while nodding to historical pieces by Robert Ryman, Rauschenberg and Johns.[10][42][21] Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit ("Fast Eddie") and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai ("Open Feast") in 2019 respectively featured, among other work, new floating "blockhead" paintings reworking an early skull motif and a vibrant 65-foot variation on his table paintings.[13][12]

Martinez has had three later solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash: "Love Letters" and "Yard Work" (both 2018) and "Homework" (2020).[43][21] "Love Letters" featured largely abstract paintings based on enlarged images drawn on a small, personalized notepad (the names and address often visible); Identifiable forms arrayed in a loosely associative way occasionally peek out to create a sense of reality described as both playful and discomfiting.[43] "Homework," an online exhibition of small works on cardboard made during the COVID-19 lockdown, continued Martinez's interest in exploring seriality by testing and repeating single compositions and forms.[21][12]