Eddie Martinez became interested in graffiti and street art in his adolescence, having taken notice of the practice when he moved to San Diego in the ninth grade. Rather than the style of tagging, the artist was interested in character-based graffiti, frequently copying cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes, the Simpsons, and Wolverine.
Read MoreWhile Martinez has moved on to a primarily studio-based practice, his experience with graffiti techniques is evident in his paintings on canvas, where he plays with scale and gestural mark-making.
Martinez has described his process as akin to boxing, channeling aggression and energy into his work. Through the use of spray paint, rags, and scrapers, Martinez works quickly, as if he were battling the canvas in front of him, stepping in and out of the work to assess his progress.
Martinez's large-scale mixed-media canvases often feature cartoonish figures alongside quotidian objects such as food, dining items, and sports paraphernalia, rendered in gestural strokes. Utilising mediums such as oil, enamel, acrylic, spray paint, pencil, and collage, these paintings contain rich imagery that allude to specific moments in art history, including movements like Dadaism, Neo-expressionism, and Cubism, alongside more contemporary and urban phenomena such as graffiti and skateboard culture. Martinez's work has been likened to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, and Pablo Picasso.
In Snakesperience (2006), Martinez paints a caricatural image of a face surrounded by vibrantly coloured and polka-dotted drawings of ceilings, chimneys, and animals including a bird, snake, and a cat. In The Grass is Never Greener (2009), he paints four figures sitting at a table, their details blurred yet certain with thick dark strokes. On the table, viewers see a range of items, such as a playing card and an envelope. Another work, The Feast (2010), also includes a table setting. This triptych, featuring twelve characters, mirrors Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (1495—1498), and leaves the viewer to sift through a banquet of food and drinks, finding a burger, two baked chickens, bottles, a cornucopia, and more.
Martinez has also utilised speech bubbles in his work. In Back Looker (2010), a figure lays down as a speech bubble attached to its mouth reveals a plethora of imagery, including a sketch of Donald Duck, flowers, and other strokes of colour and seemingly random shapes.
In 2013, Martinez's work made a turn to abstraction with his exhibition Matador. Several works from this series feature similar compositions and colour palettes of red, white, yellow, blue, and black, only slightly altered in each iteration.
Martinez adapts his abstraction tendencies in painting to his sculptural work. Through a range of found material such as plaster, wood, rubber, and badminton rackets combined with bronze casting, Martinez's sculptures employ raw materials to produce unique silhouettes. Much like his painting, Martinez also uses sculpture to reference the history and traditions of the medium, reflecting the lineages of Arte Povera and the readymade.
