At his studio in Queens, the artist's routine includes turkey meatballs, cut-up Crocs and the patience to let his materials set his pace.
In the artist Eddie Martinez's dense, polychrome paintings, each mark is haunted by the gesture that made it and each color seems to demand its own verb: The thick gray drips; a bright red streak declares; a daub of blue hesitates. Even white pigment, which has frequently appeared in Martinez's pieces since his 2018 "White Out" series, has a charged presence, boldly countering a base painting or washed thinly across the canvas so that the ghost of an underlying color peeks through. His teeming works seem, on the one hand, to be urgently composed, but the carefully accrued coats of paint - sprayed, silk-screened or directly applied from pigment sticks - also point to an artist who knows how to surrender to the pace set by his materials. "I need the paint to dry to produce the layers," Martinez tells me one overcast afternoon in his studio in Ridgewood, Queens, ahead of his solo show at London's Timothy Taylor gallery, opening October 12. The walls are hung with pieces in varying stages of completion. He pauses in front of one and leaves a single, deliberate stroke of brown. "I have to override my impatience for the sake of letting it become the painting it needs to become," he says.
