“Paintings that look like a giant’s drawings.”

Bumper Traffic, Oil, acrylic, silkscreen ink and enamel on canvas 108 x 144 in. (274.3 x 365.8 cm)

An Interview with Visual Artist Eddie Martinez

Eddie Martinez’s recent exhibition Salmon Eye, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, started out small. Martinez began each work as a sketchbook-sized drawing, little more than a doodle, which he would then blow up and print on massive canvases. After, he would paint on top of the drawing, riffing off of it, adding layers and colors that exaggerate or respond to the original. The resulting works combine the lightness and movement of a sketch with the monumental scale of a masterpiece.  

A departure from the more shape-based, abstract compositions of his recent past, Salmon Eye signals Martinez’ return to representational imagery; many of the new paintings feel like vibrant, playful takes on the still life, the landscape, and even the portrait. These works synthesize unselfconscious abstraction with representational tropes to produce a pictorial language that is both formally skilled and childishly imaginative. They possess the immediacy of a dream or hallucination, raised to the level of the sublime.

Beyond the subtle touch and evocative mark-making evident in this exhibition, these paintings have dynamic outer structures, embedded in their line work, that echo in rhythmic webs, giving the chaos of these compositions a kind of mathematical internal harmony and proportion. The works include energetic splatters and deft calligraphy, the cascading freedom of chance operations balanced with Martinez’s incredibly articulate draftsmanship. It is a visual vocabulary of grandeur and grit.

I met with Martinez at Mitchell-Innes & Nash before a book signing in February of 2016. When he talked about his art, his eyes lit up. His enthusiasm for panting seemed, at times, like the well-worn familiarity of a master craftsman, and at others like the newfound excitement of a man discovering a favorite hobby. In the end, the quality that makes Martinez’s paintings uniquely and unmistakably his own is easy to recognize but almost impossible to define systematically—a distinctive touch, a dynamic energy, part restless and part epic. These paintings explode, but they also dance.  

—Max Fierst

THE BELIEVER: What role does drawing have in your process?

EDDIE MARTINEZ: It’s almost outside of the process in a way because everything is about drawing, it always goes back to drawing. Drawing is the most immediate thing you can do anywhere. It’s like having a meditation practice, you can just take it with you wherever you go, wherever you are, no matter what. You can generally get a pen and a piece of paper or even like a barf bag on a plane.

BLVR: Right, you can bring paper with you or...