Collateral, Venice
Eddie Martinez
Nomader
San Marino PavilionEddie Martinez represents the Republic of San Marino at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the Nomader project presents a new body of works by the American artist, conceived specifically for La Fucina del Futuro, the same location as the Pavilion for the Biennale Architettura in 2023. The San Marino Pavilion is designed and realised by FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea S.p.a., a San Marino company headed by Roberto Felicetti, Vincenzo Rotondo and Alessandro Bianchini, with the support of the Secretary of State for Education and Culture and the supervision of Commissioner Paolo Rondelli and Deputy Commissioner Riccardo Varini. The world’s oldest republic, San Marino has often looked to foreign artists for its national participation in La Biennale di Venezia. The choice pays homage to the country’s history as a place of hospitality and refuge and to its present as an important tourist center and university seat of international renown, known for being open and welcoming. The biography and conceptual underpinnings of Eddie Martinez’s work relate to the multiplicity of meanings suggested by the title Strangers Everywhere, the theme proposed by Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the Biennale Arte 2024. Martinez was marked by an itinerant childhood, lacking conventional stability. During his peripatetic coming-of-age period, Martinez moved back and forth between opposite regions of the United States, bouncing from coast to coast, sometimes being uprooted more than once a year. Martinez’s magpie style of appropriating fragments of imagery and themes emanates from his nomadic background. Traces of the different landscapes traversed during his youth occasionally appear in his iconography, which includes fragments of images from a nomadic life, revisited and transformed from work to work. Martinez felt perpetually foreign, regardless of where he lived, until he put down roots in Brooklyn as an adult. Drawing was the element that gave Martinez continuity throughout his life, having begun his practice at a young age. Even when he was constantly traveling, portable materials allowed him to invest in drawing as a core practice, which has been the backbone of his work ever since. Drawing provided Martinez with a sense of home, giving him comfort and allowing him to explore his imagination; in turn, drawing became the generative engine of his painting and sculptural practices. Alison M. Gingeras says: “Just as the Biennale’s curatorial theme embraces the notion of ‘Homo Migrans’ – the supposition that to be human means to migrate, to physically move, mentally change, and traverse cultures and identities – so does the visual universe of Martinez’s oeuvre. Martinez has allowed his work to formally and conceptually migrate from the legacy of automatic drawing, and abstraction practiced by the CoBrA group to his distinctive take on post-Philip Guston cartoony figuration, as well as his unusual revisitation of various classical art genres such as still lifes and portraiture. His experimental, heterogeneous practice is ever-changing, deploying different media as if always trying to make his visual language foreign to himself.” “My work,” says Eddie Martinez, “is not tied to a school or genre: it is a kind of superabundance of thoughts and ideas that sometimes clarifies itself.” The title Nomader summarizes Martinez’s relationship with forms and ideas, moving from drawing to sculpture and painting, from figuration to abstraction and vice versa. This neologism suggests both the theme of nomadism, both physical and cultural, and a phonetic play on the American pronunciation that sounds like “no matter.” Both meanings resonate with the artist’s work and his imagery.