January 14 – February 20, 2010 Reception for the Artist: Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm
In his recent paintings, Martinez expands an ever-widening visual vocabulary. Thoughts this cacophonous and grandiloquent do not translate to mere language, they are the stuff of dreams. Here, exclamations of color are object enough. Still lifes explode with vibrant flora; a tugboat is distilled to its most elemental, abstract parts; imperious tabletop constructions serve as psychologically charged landscapes or transform into a thought bubble’s torrential rant; and, finally, where the figure emerges, ducks and skulls shed a knowing tear, while bright eyed, helmeted child warriors stand guard. All boldly conceived in thick, juicy clots of pigment— these hieroglyphs and barely delineated figuration teeter on the edge of decipherability.
One of three six by nine foot canvases features four figures holding court at a glimmering green table strewn with shapes and colors, makeshift fragments created with Martinez’s signature urgency. An empty chair to the left of the scene invites the viewer to join in and let the gamesmanship begin. In direct challenge to the bright detritus of the aforementioned works are two sets featuring new modes of working: all white tableaux whose gestures come straight from the tube and black canvases incised to reveal previous layers of subtle coloration, reductive scratchiti of primal immediacy.
Accompanying the suite of paintings are works on paper, small pieces that are crucial to Martinez’s practice, and a suite of hand-colored etchings produced in a collaboration with Forth Estate. Martinez’s work was recently seen in “New York Minute” at MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and has been included in shows at Blum & Poe, Deitch Projects, Peres Projects, Alexander & Bonin, and the Deste Foundation, among many others. He was named one of 2009’s top fifteen young artists by Interview Magazine. This is his third solo exhibition at ZieherSmith.
REVIEW
New York York Times "Art in Review." ROBERTA SMITH
Eddie Martinez, who briefly attended art school in Boston and spent more time there working outdoors on graffiti art, has exceptional gifts as a painter and draftsman, which he exuberantly combines. Generally, he has not yet made them his own, but his third show at ZieherSmith suggests enough determination, industriousness and dexterity to get the job done.
It contains some dozen canvases, about 20 mixed-media drawings and a set of seven hand-colored drypoints. The strongest works are in the minority: four carbon-transfer drawings; two small black canvases whose scratched-in images reveal colors underneath; two all-white paintings whose motifs are simply outlined in caulk squeezed from the tube; and “Shadows and Dust” and “Brewer,” in which landscapes of emphatic scribbles in red and black are threatened by solid black from above.
Mr. Martinez’s evolving style is a kind of updated, liberated Neo-Expressionism that looks all over the place for guidance: to Picasso, early Peter Saul, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, de Kooning and David Hockney. Portrait, still life and landscape mix; Donald Duck makes several appearances. Small clusters, scattered fields or pileups of shapes, objects and hieroglyphs are a constant. There are also paintings within paintings, some of which make their own appearance in the show.
In the large painting titled “Back Looker,” one such pile is crowded into a speech balloon attached to a reclining figure’s mouth; perhaps a painter talking incessantly about art. In “The Grass Is Never Greener” a more orderly accumulation is laid out on a tilted green tabletop in front of four boxy figures, including Donald. An empty chair suggests that the viewer can join the discussion. Incoherence and generic skill overtake several works, but Mr. Martinez is better when he juggles more, not less.
