San Marino (Republic of)

Biennale Arte 2024’s curatorial theme Foreigners Everywhere implies the philosophical notion of “Homo Migrans”—the supposition that to be human is to migrate, to physically move, mentally change, and traverse cultures and identities. And so does the visual universe of Eddie Martinez’s œuvre.
As a painter, Martinez has allowed his work to formally and conceptually migrate from the legacy of automatic drawing, and abstraction as practiced by the CoBrA group, to his distinctive take on post-Philip Guston cartoony figuration, and finally to his unusual revisitation of various art-historical genres such as still life and portraiture. His experimental, nomadic practice is ever-changing, deploying different media (oil, enamel, spray paint, collage, found objects, and more) as if he were always trying to make his visual language foreign to himself.
Nomader encapsulates Martinez’s peripatetic relationship to forms and ideas, cycling from drawing to sculpture to painting, from figuration to abstraction, and back again. This neologism suggests both the itinerancy of a “nomad”, and a phonetic play on the American pronunciation that sounds like “no matter”. Both meanings resonate with the work and the artist’s embrace of the open-ended meanings suggested by his imagery.