LOYAL GALLERY Editor - from the exhibition text
- Martinez’s phrasing is more suggestive than literal. In his work you do not find a singular point of view or an opinion recorded in paint. It is being recorded in paint. The living of life and its turbulences and aspirations, flipped and tossed with finesse until it spins. Easy to sing yet difficult to play, perfectly constructed yet tricky to decipher. It’s like little puzzles that he gives to you and they can mean what they mean. It’s like a distillation of the experience rather than a depiction of it. Retaining the power of abstraction, but all the while reaching out for form. When the pen hits the paper some invisible map takes hold and it all seems to unfold, but you can’t see the plan yet because beneath lies a system of organization respected by the artist, his own percussive system. Deep bass booms and rounded sounds. Soft baritone voice like a big brush. Washes of color, delicate and gentle. Thin wavering lines, like flute notes hovering above the composition. A high trumpet part as yellow banana. A soft harmony of red spotted mushrooms. Woo-ma-aan. Every color, sound and shape has a natural feeling-tone, just as every feeling has equivalence in the world of sight and sound. This rhythm can also be seen in the seriality that has always been an important part of Martinez’s practice as he constantly revisits, seeking new ways of revisiting groupings of forms he’d already ordered, knowing their possibilities to be infinite. It’s a whole collection of imagery that relates but hits in different ways at different times, right down the line.