small sketches inform Martinez’s large drawings, paintings, and sculptures, sometimes physically entering another work to become buried amid the paint, at other times remain sovereign and intact. Frequently, Martinez reworks the sketches so that when he returns the drawings to the wall they read as distinct compositions, bearing traces of the old even as they introduce new observations. In this way, the drawings provide a living catalogue of the artist’s creative process—one that is open, responsive, and always changing. This openness is not confined to Martinez’s method; it also manifests itself in the compositions that he creates via his preferred materials like marker, crayon, color pencil, and his beloved Sharpie.7 Indeed, if there is a consistency to Martinez’s choice of “subject,” I would argue that it is located within the conversational aspects of his forms and figures—what one might refer to as an aesthetic of encounter or approach—where divergent motifs gesture towards one another over distances and flat planes. Consider Untitled (2016) [PL. 11], in which a loosely-drawn, inky figure extends an appendage in the direction of a bright orange shape that lies slinky-like on the horizon; or Untitled (2016) [PL. 21] wherein a dense, bust-like form executed in opaque, black enamel paint confronts a similarly curvilinear albeit open pinwheel drawn in red marker. There is a kind of unexpected empathy implicit in these encounters that is nowhere so palpable as in Untitled (c. 2011–17) [PL. 30], a Sharpie drawing in which a faceless foreground figure reaches an outsized hand towards a snowman-like tower of wobbly circles. This is a poignant, humanistic vision of selfextension towards another. Executed with a simple black line on white paper, this image recalls the ink drawings that Philip Guston, one of Martinez’s acknowledged heroes, made with the poet Clark Coolidge in the early 1970s. In this collaboration, the notion of extension, of gesturing across boundaries, is paramount in the work titled Untitled (The Drawing) (1975) [FIG. 1] in which two fingers reach down from the sky to trace a horizon line. “A line in the silence of else, stopless. Surface, edgeless,” reads Coolidge’s text. When I saw this drawing recently 7
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On the centrality of the Sharpie to Martinez’s work, see interview with Katherine Bernhardt in this volume, 16.