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Lot Essay
Known for his energetic use of line and manipulation of color, Eddie Martinez brings together popular culture, art historical references, and vivid personal experiences in his paintings and sculptures. Table, Quilt, Table #2 is a quintessential example of the artist’s work in which a trapezoid tablet contains exuberant brush marks of red, bright blue, green, purple, yellow, and black. Different forms and shapes create an energetic mix of form and color. While certain elements such as a bird cage, a flower, and a banana are more discernable than others, their constant interlacing diminishes the legibility of these individual elements. Concrete forms become dematerialized through the artist’s dynamic application of color, and consequently distilled on a more structural level.
Martinez incorporates a variety of media in his work. Various combinations of materials, including oil paint, enamel, spray paint and collage objects, highlight the innovative and exuberant aspects of his work. The canvas is no longer passive, but rather an active object that participates in the constant negotiations between abstraction and figuration, illusion and material reality.
The trapezoid tablet, with its black supports and variegated stand, serves both as a structural element in the pictorial space and as a vehicle that enables different ways of viewing. It takes on a duality, as the viewer tries to read the medley of forms contained within the frame, whilst simultaneously seeing it from a larger plane, namely the canvas itself. This device of double framing suggests a certain degree of distancing. Unlike Pollock’s action paintings, noted for their all-over surface and intensely gestural movements, Martinez’s Table, Quilt, Table #2 reflects the artist’s somehow willful detachment from his work. By asserting some distance between his emotions and the painting, the artist sets limits on the degree to which he should “lodge” his emotions.
While such distance i s t o some extent asserted when Martinez interacts with the canvas, there are visual clues that complicate the relationship between the artist and the surface, as well as the viewer and the painting. The pool of red brush marks at the bottom right can be seen as the “eye of the painting.” Crossing the borders of the trapezoid tablet, it occupies two realities at the same time: one within the tablet, and the world outside its framing. Their ongoing tensions animate the pictorial surface and reorient the structure within painting and vision.
Martinez incorporates a variety of media in his work. Various combinations of materials, including oil paint, enamel, spray paint and collage objects, highlight the innovative and exuberant aspects of his work. The canvas is no longer passive, but rather an active object that participates in the constant negotiations between abstraction and figuration, illusion and material reality.
The trapezoid tablet, with its black supports and variegated stand, serves both as a structural element in the pictorial space and as a vehicle that enables different ways of viewing. It takes on a duality, as the viewer tries to read the medley of forms contained within the frame, whilst simultaneously seeing it from a larger plane, namely the canvas itself. This device of double framing suggests a certain degree of distancing. Unlike Pollock’s action paintings, noted for their all-over surface and intensely gestural movements, Martinez’s Table, Quilt, Table #2 reflects the artist’s somehow willful detachment from his work. By asserting some distance between his emotions and the painting, the artist sets limits on the degree to which he should “lodge” his emotions.
While such distance i s t o some extent asserted when Martinez interacts with the canvas, there are visual clues that complicate the relationship between the artist and the surface, as well as the viewer and the painting. The pool of red brush marks at the bottom right can be seen as the “eye of the painting.” Crossing the borders of the trapezoid tablet, it occupies two realities at the same time: one within the tablet, and the world outside its framing. Their ongoing tensions animate the pictorial surface and reorient the structure within painting and vision.