Restartation

“All my drawings start with a line drawing. I don’t use a silk screen all the time, but it’s a tool that I started employing in 2015, with the continued interest of trying to have a large painting feel like a small, intimate drawing — specifically like one made with a Sharpie on the couch.” – EDDIE MARTINEZ

As curator João Ribas asserts, Martinez’s works “look to genre painting to enact a confrontation with tradition, negotiating a set of pictorial conventions drawn from the vocabulary of genre, yet through the modernist logic of subjective, individual style. […] Martinez pairs traditional structure with self-generated imagery. The results are dense, playful, but considered paintings, revolving around the iteration of his signature motifs” (João Ribas, “A Paradox of Genre”, 2008).