EDDIE MARTINEZ: INSIDE THOUGHTS
Mitchell-Innes & Nash announces its third solo presentation of new paintings by artist Eddie Martinez on view from January 21 – February 27, 2021.
“Martinez’s latest group of paintings, many executed during the lockdown of 2020, are works in which he practically takes stock of all he has thus far achieved in his art. They reveal, too, a new mastery of his skills and ideas. The themes are still rooted in tradition and art historical precedents, yet are expressed with a contemporary sensibility. As for representational imagery and abstract principles, that dialogue continues.
Martinez has returned once again to an art dominated by people, places and things. Take the heads that he has rendered in black and white. They’re summarily depicted yet so familiar. Look again and you’ll notice that the artist is breaking the rules of composition.
In the context of so many colorful canvases, the White Outs stand out as exercises in looking as we peer to discern what has been portrayed. There are heads to decipher as well as things (flowers in a vase). Three people are seated at a table in their Sunday best. The woman has on a hat; the man is in shirtsleeves held together by cuff links. Check off two categories. They’re gathered with foodstuffs arranged like still lifes.
And then there are tables tilted as if they were being envisioned by Paul Cézanne. With their surfaces crowded with objects they are a cross between things and places. Looking at Martinez’s recent works calls to mind the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton. In the first of his ‘Four Quartets,’, the poet wrote: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.’
Think about it. Eddie Martinez is making visual poetry.”
Phyllis Tuchman.
Brooklyn-based artist, Eddie Martinez’s work joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways. Imbued with a sense of personal iconography, his practice often combines signature figurative elements, such as bug-eyed humans and eclectic headgear, with gestural, abstract blocks of color. Energetic and raw, his paintings employ an aggressive use of color and texture with various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint and collage elements on canvas. Martinez also produces large and small-scale abstract sculpture, made mostly from found materials such as rubber hoses, Styrofoam, cardboard, and metal scraps sourced from wherever the artist is working at the time then cast in bronze.
Eddie Martinez was born in 1977 in Groton Naval Base, Groton, Connecticut and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo museum exhibitions include the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, (2019-2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2019); The Bronx Museum, New York (2018); The Drawing Center, New York (2017) and The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA (2017). He has also had solo exhibitions at Perrotin, Hong Kong (2019); Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2014); Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Half Gallery, New York (2014). Additionally, Martinez’s work has been featured in Modern Painters, ARTINFO, The New York Times, ArtReview, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.