Gritty, raw, and unequivocally dynamic, Martinez’s radical approach to painting infuses expressionism’s brute aggression and pop’s frivolous allure with brazen street-savvy graffiti-esque attitude. His high-impact canvases, evolved from his intensive engagement with drawing, accumulate as explosive fields of animated mark-making restrained only by the measure of his chosen motifs: the time honoured genres of portraiture and still life operating as classical platforms for Martinez’s painterly inventiveness.

Beginning with three small portraits from his Untitled Series, Martinez conceives his surfaces as a purely physical domain: as statuesque heads, comically puerile and primitive, appear as if chiselled from paint, their illusive solidity wrought from bold spontaneous gestures sliced through thickly textured grounds. This teasing paint v. sculpture discombobulation is compounded in Martinez’s floral arrangements which flourish with heavy-handed absurdity. In Blue Flowers an impossible bouquet of crude concrete blooms insistently predicate their ‘realness’ – the sheer bulk of their form and intensity of hue barely contained by the stylised vase.