Eddie Martinez: Enough

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Enough, an exhibition of new paintings by Eddie Martinez. For two decades, Martinez has developed a singular approach to gestural abstraction that involves the deep processing of a personal lexicon of images, idioms, and themes. The nine large-scale paintings in this exhibition, Martinez’s third at Timothy Taylor, are muscular and exuberant, brimming with the propulsive energy that characterises the artist’s work.

The exhibition coincides with Frieze London, for which Timothy Taylor will present a solo booth of Martinez’s work. Curated by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator of the Drawing Center in New York, the presentation will build on Martinez’s 2017 solo exhibition at that institution, wherein he mounted paintings over “wallpaper” comprised of thousands of drawings pinned to the wall.

Martinez has described the drive behind his recent paintings as a desire to return to his true nature—to inhabit a mode of experience that precedes the influence of visual culture, marketing, or the media. In these canvases, painted between 2021 and 2023, he transcribes, layers, comingles, obscures, and exaggerates images sourced from drawings he compulsively makes throughout the day. Art-historical references surface, but so do his child’s toys, tennis balls, skulls, Raid bug spray, flowers, and a prostrate figure he calls “the defeated.” These images emerge and recede from Martinez’s abundant compositions, depending on where the viewer focuses the eye; none is prioritized over the other.

Working in oil, acrylic, spray paint, and silkscreen ink, Martinez applies paint with a tangible vigour, using whatever tool is at hand—a screw, a paint cap, the wrong end of a brush. He repeats marks at different speeds and with varied intensities, in multiple mediums and scales. Often, he recycles and reworks imagery from past paintings, cannibalizing his own production. In this way, Martinez strips preconceived ideas away from an image in order to understand it differently. This activity, he explains, reflects his process of reconciling with the past and accepting what’s to come.

In the electric red canvas Bufly No. 21 (2023), the outline of a butterfly becomes a container for a maximalist exploration of colour and mark-making styles. When Martinez’s toddler son became fixated on the insect—whose name he comically mispronounced—“buflies” were suddenly everywhere, including the artist’s work. Like mandalas, speech bubbles, or tabletops have functioned in Martinez’s earlier paintings, the bufly serves as an organizing principle that mimics the artist’s quotidian experience. The exhibition also includes three paintings from the artist’s ongoing Whiteouts series, in which Martinez veils colourful compositions with white paint. Applied in various degrees of opacity and transparency, the white pushes bolder hues back while it asserts itself, generating an almost sculptural quality on the canvas. The whiteout strategy introduces a complexity to established formal relationships, allowing Martinez to conceive them anew. Likewise, this effect encourages the viewer to slow down and consider nuances of line, shape, and colour. Indeed, the works in Enough ask us to see through and among multiple layers of information, to look, and look again.