Martinez’s semi-abstract scenarios have an incredible narrative energy, although this never becomes constrictive or authoritative; on the contrary, it creates a nonverbal, completely open painterly space that always reflects not only life but also painting and the history of painting. This results in the constant formation of abstract, reduced objects and symbols to which the artist repeatedly returns in his works over the years, like mandalas or the breath in meditation: tennis balls, flowers, or his gridded, cube-shaped “blockheads,” which in his words arose from “probably looking at Guston and Picasso too much when I was younger. It sort of came out of a vision I had of a Picassoid face emerging out of a Guston-type brick wall. Then it became a totemic thing. And a form to make paintings around.”