Deeply indebted to the histories of painting, yet realised in an immediately contemporary manner, Martinez’s canvases – formed from oil paint, enamel, spray paint, screen printing and studio detritus – are loaded with coloured, quasi-abstract masses in varying densities juxtaposed against shifting lines. The resulting dynamic imagery moves and merges from figuration to abstraction and back again.
“I’m gonna grab my roller chair,” says Eddie Martinez. Which he does. We’re in Timothy Taylor in London looking at his new paintings. The very kind PR who has offered to get me a coffee has returned with it, but there’s nowhere to put it near us, with me standing and holding a phone as a mic, and Eddie sitting in his office roller chair, so the coffee sits slowly cooling on the side of the conversation like a gooseberry while we talk. I drink it on the way out and it’s still a nice temperature. If you get bored at any point reading this, think about the coffee.
Eddie is the kind of guy who gets himself a roller chair without asking if I’d like one too, but he also invites me to touch the paintings and explains them, and it’s all nice. He’s also apologetic about his self-professed inarticulacy and I should have told him that he didn’t need to be.
Timothy Taylor‘s “Cowboy Town” exhibition—which opened to the public on Thursday—gathers a series of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez.
