Eddie Martinez (artist)
[1][4][5] While contemporary in his choice of materials and subjects, he bridges a wide range of historical influences, including CoBrA, Action painting, neo-expressionism and Philip Guston, and classical conventions of portraiture, still life and allegorical narrative, filtered through the lens of daily experience and popular culture.
[23] Martinez's work shifts between traditional and unconventional modes of abstract and figurative painting and drawing, reinterpreting the past (his own and that of art history) and blurring boundaries to push his practice in new directions.
[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).
[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][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).
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
