Timothy Taylor presents 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 characterizes the artist’s work.
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 Art-historical references surface, but so do his child’s toys, tennis balls, skulls, Raid bug spray, flowers, and a prostrate figure he calls “the defeated.”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.
| Duration | 12 October 2023 - 18 November 2023 |
| Times | Tuesday to Friday 10am – 6pm Saturday 11am – 5pm |
| Cost | free |
| Venue | Timothy Taylor |
| Address | 15 Bolton Street, London, W1J 8BG |
| Contact | 442074093344 / mail@timothytaylor.com / www.timothytaylor.com/ |