MELVIN MARTINEZ
Fresh Paint
Yvon Lambert
550 West 21st Street, Chelsea
Through June 30

Link – Art in Review – New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/arts/design/22gall.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Much is wrong with the Puerto Rican artist Melvin Martinez’s paintings. Here are a few offenses: too much hot pink; impastoed flowers and ribbons applied with a pastry bag; canvases adorned with fake roses, feathers, butterflies, Christmas bows, plastic tulips and bagfuls of glitter.

What makes these “wrong” is Mr. Martinez’s simultaneous allegiance to modernist traditions. He takes the idiom of Abstract Expressionism and mixes it with cloying Rococo sentimentality, joining 18th-century whimsy in unholy matrimony with mid-20th-century modernist rigor and angst.

Within this context the heroicism of painters like Pollock (whose cigarette butts embedded in his paintings were “accidental” relics of an existential artist too hard at work to use an ashtray) is turned into a fiesta of bright, cheap, shiny things. (Or, as the gallery release puts it, “the distinctive celebratory elements of the Caribbean region” where Mr. Martinez lives.)

Other works here include “Enchanting Garden,” a 27-foot-long canvas that recalls Monet’s more abstract “Water Lilies” compositions, often described as precursors to Abstract Expressionism.

There’s something kind of great about Mr. Martinez’s flagrant transgressions. And he hardly stands alone in simultaneously embracing and defying formalist strictures. His palette at times conjures Joan Mitchell; at other moments, Peter Halley; his devotion to discount-store materials, Jessica Stockholder (or a thousand other artists); his Puerto Rican-inspired, more-is-more aesthetic, the installation artist Pepón Osorio.

There are moments, however, when Mr. Martinez’s work runs the risk of sliding too far into excess — or regional caricature — until, like one of those delicious tropical drinks, it sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’ve had too much. MARTHA SCHWENDENER