Eddie Martinez's Matador at The Journal opens tonight

The creation of Eddie Martinez' Matador paintings is a physical bout. At work, Martinez paces around the studio—blasting music, slapping on paint, sanding, scooping debris from the ground and smearing it into a layer of thick paint. Around him, the canvases lean against the walls, tall and wide like bulls, towering, and he bounces between them, working on up to eight paintings at once. "When I'm painting these," he says, "it feels like it's either me or the canvas who’s coming out the victor."

In his newest series, Martinez builds his abstractions from a "loosely fixed" cast of characters. He's sculpted these shapes to point toward something familiar without ever pointing directly at anything particular: the red slab, the yellow column, the black spade, and floating cube of deep blue. Sometimes, there's a rogue patch of canvas with the patina of an urban concrete wall.

In his older work these forms congealed into flowers, figures and tables filled with objects, but this new energy is looser, more liquid. From a distance, the paintings appear similar, with minor variations, up close every inch buzzes with nuanced detail—bleeding mineral spirits, gestural power sanding, a tight mess of scratches, a buried cough drop wrapper: a vocabulary of mark making that Martinez expands with every canvas.

Behind the creation of the Matador paintings are hundreds of studies—drawings done on his iPad or with crayon on paper. They are completed quickly and compulsively in an attempt at "exhausting the composition."

Martinez uses a spray paint can like other artists use a pencil. He thinks of the canvas as blank paper: For him, the ultimate goal is to achieve what he calls a "painted drawing"—a fully developed wet work with the immediate energy of a sketch. It's an elusive achievement he's sought for years.

He’s never been to a bullfight. Martinez finds them unappealing, but relates to the sweeping maneuvers and animalistic battle of the matador. He thrives in the conflict of painting, getting knocked around in the studio, leaving the aftermath on the canvas.

—Ross Simonini