An insect is squashed, a dog buried. The first snow falls, plants on a windowsill bloom, a toy is left behind in a parking lot. When we are children, the first existential, all-changing experiences of life, death, time and transience usually do not enter our lives in big, dramatic situations. It is the small, ephemeral moments that don’t really register in the macrocosm of adults that take us across a mystical threshold, making us feel previously unknown sensations of grief, joy, creation and destruction, as well as helping us to see ourselves as part of a greater whole.

Ever since Eddie Martinez had what he refers to as “a wasp nest situation” at his Long Island home in the summer of 2021, the can of Raid bug spray has become a recurring motif in his paintings, appearing in different variations in works such as the titular work of this exhibition, Supernature (2022) and Endangered (2022).

Probably the most famous insecticide in the world, Raid was first launched in the US in 1956, right in the middle of the Cold War, when Abstract Expressionism was the epitome of the art of the free West. The first Raid cartoon commercial, with its popular “Kills Bugs Dead” slogan, was realized by none other than Tex Avery. The plot of these commercials, which were produced for over forty years, always remains the same: dart-nosed mosquitoes, pudgy bugs, and ravenous ants plan raids on the kitchen and the garden where picture-perfect apples and plastic flowers grow. Their exploits are always brought to a halt by the Raid superhero spray can, whose nozzle emits a kind of atomic annihilation ray that sends the screaming insects to kingdom come.

In Eddie Martinez’s Raid paintings, everything is illuminated in a flowing stream of consciousness: the microcosm we discover on a table, in a flower, the undisguised sense of a new, completely fresh experience, cold war, the visual repertoire of Abstract Expressionism and the post-conceptual painting movements that followed in response, the DNA of cartoons from the fifties and sixties, all fused with flashes of the here and now, ephemeral perceptions, the artist’s whole life – everything, everywhere, all at once.

As if in an echo chamber, the gestural abstractions of fragmented cartoon vermin linger; eyebrows left in mid-air, along with potato-shaped bodies, something creepy-crawly, a grin frozen into a line. And then there is the can of Raid, which Martinez boldly scrawls onto the canvas in an ever-changing array of strokes and flourishes. It might be a tank, a cannon, part of a fragmented logo, perhaps a revolver with a finger already on the trigger.

In Supernature, Raid itself becomes a ghostly insect, or a soldier behind a gas mask, standing among Martinez’s signature still lifes filled with toxic cartoon flowers and bulbous mushrooms. And this supernature is equally reminiscent of something, of the graphically cool flower forms of Christopher Wool or Carroll Dunham, of Audrey II, the carnivorous flower from The Little Shop of Horrors, of the fragile, hypersensitive lines of Matisse’s floral still lifes. With paint streaming from the nozzle, Martinez makes the Raid figure scream or howl like a siren through just a few boldly placed gestures and strokes.

- Oliver Koerner von Gustorf