NYAB Event - Eddie Martinez "Studio Drawings"

Eddie Martinez "Studio Drawings"

Half Gallery

This event has ended.

The eyes grab you. They're a Martinez signature, a dead giveaway. It's the DeKooning eye jaundiced through the kooky karma antics of Felix the Cat, Howard the Duck and Zippy the Pinhead. It is comic, but seriously comic. Sort of pagan Divine Comedy. It has a totemic power, DeKooning's woman transformed into Pacific Northwest Thunderbird. It is the introspective gaze of the eye floating over the pyramid on the dollar bill under the slogan "Annuit Coeptis" or "He favors our undertaking." It is an eye that is world-weary but not jaded, friendly but inscrutable, wide-eyed but hardly innocent, possibly catatonic yet seemingly possessed of X-ray vision. It's an immunized eye that looks on without fear at the chaos surrounding it. The Eddie Martinez eye is the witness that is silent, but for now. It seems ready to speak. The eye is a door that swings both ways. The eye looks out to see in.

At times, when a sudden idea or image presents itself to the intellect, there is a distinct and sometimes painful sensation of luminosity produced in the eye, observable even in broad daylight. --Nikolai Telsa, The Action of the eye

Martinez draws lines as if against a current. Art, like electricity, encounters resistance from the universe. Ohms law of drawing: the creative current through a line between two points is directly proportional to the potential creative difference across the two points. You can almost see his drawings as aura renderings, sketches of the usually invisible. If the currents here are electrically motivated they still possess a liquid quality. Ink obeys gravity and follows the peculiar physics of image making. These works should sometimes be viewed in moonlight.

The artists' antennae move across the chaotic wavelength spectrum of the moment, synthesizing and transmitting to the limbs and fingers data gleaned from the apparently random electromagnetic feedback of the urban grid and its interference with the natural firmament, forcing it into a simulacrum of order that resembles the child's attempts to impose order on his unfamiliar environment. Zing!

Today everybody says, "It is what it is." But with representation it is what it isn't. Always. In modernism there was considerable experiment in how isn't it could be and still evoke is. This is where the magic eye comes in. The magic eye spots the gods moving around in forests and parks, reads the situation from how the birds fly and how the clouds are shaped. The magic eye reads the city, finding signs of order in the amorphia of ruins, the spoor of commerce, the dispersed signatures of vanished witnesses. The magic eye is I.

Martinez loves found surfaces and the texture of urban motion the way Aaron Siskind did, finding beauty in the random, creation in decay. Consider: the studio as dump. In our inverted world ripped and worn is good. People pay extra for jeans that got beat up in the factory. Martinez's studio is filled with good drawings in stepped on piles. There are black smudges everywhere, from the furniture to the artists face, the palette is here and there too, wherever color has landed . The floor is a collage of rubber gloves paper towels pieces cut out of paintings. The process isn't pretty but in the end it's beautiful. When you leave you might leave a trail of footprints down the hall. And it's perfect. The drawings and paintings aren't distressed in the fashion sense, but they are treated with a democratic sense of nivellement. Not in the sense of abasing art as much as saying, 'hey, it's all good.' They are experienced.

This work is about color and what it means. Black is the glue and the gloom that frames the joy; it's the night, the coal, the oil. White is black's foil, the oxygen in the room that's always pushing a little smoke around. The visible spectrum's notes, chords and scales are the code, the bebop riot that's acting out responses to questions that will come around eventually, like the stars that appear behind closed eyes when you press your eyeballs for answers.

Martinez isn't afraid to make abstract expressionist paintings or cubist paintings or whatever. Movements and styles don't have a sell by date. As long as artists can genuinely expand on a movement (I think groove is actually a better word) its completely valid. Dada and surrealism are as relevant today as ever, whatever they're called. Eddie Martinez isn't snowed by the notion of progress in art, as 99% of artists are. What makes his art really modern or contemporary is that it's a powerful reflection of this moment, it vibrates with the rhythm of our microsecond saturated, overdubbed, post-logical era. This is an era that has outlasted art movements and hidden beauty away where the salesmen can't readily find it. This is a moment where every artist is fighting a sketchbook war, informed and sustained by secret muses,against historians wired into suicide vests working for international banks. The artists might be making money, but they know it's money with secret codes set to go off when least expected.

Each picture is the encounter of a highly sentient, aesthetically attuned man with an environment that has evolved without a great deal of consideration toward providing for the needs, comforts and sensibilities of such a man. Martinez's artistic practice seems to be a sort of instinctive shamanic negotiation on the part of human nature with the absurd yet unavoidable constructs of monstrous unconsciousness. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain on drugs at war with a 6% interest mortgage in the LaGuardia flight path. This is Hamlet's brain contemplating Horatio's skull on caffeine vibrating in tune with the lightbulbs at 60 cycles per second listening to Lee Perry while mystery jets spray contrails over Brooklyn to the rumble of the J train. It's all about man and nature and what comes after.