Settling in Chicago at the peak of his adolescence, Martínez emerged in the mid 1970s as a muralist, owing his mood and techniques in part  to the rebellious outcries that Siquieros, Orozco, and Diego Rivera had fashioned the walls of North America. But his concern with prenatal life and birth—an early distinctive sign of his easel paintings—set him apart from the strident pamphletist breed that was to populate the barrio's street-art scenario of the time. The superfluous and at times self-destructive statements fostered by a distorted sense of ethnic pride (a sense grossly equated with marginal, inner-city life styles and extreme material poverty), ceased to become an absorbing issue for an artist who, far from becoming an apostate, firmly adhered to the authentic values of his culture of origin. 

     In his controversial exhibit at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1977, Martínez had exorcised, through a series of monumental paintings, the poetis of fright that were to shape his work throughout his artistic evolution. In that show, his imagery often recalled rather repulsive intestinal forms and textures enhance by theatrically dimming the background illumination while focusing the spot lights directly over the paintings, thus creating  a Dantesque universe which intensified our attention on the perishable, biological life cycles that too often repeal the importance of a spiritual space. In a setting akin to  Pirandello's Island of Fire—as Dante named Sicily—Martínez too found on his native soil the normative axis of misery and greatness that governs his work. 

     Although in a highly modified state, a number of Martínez’s former compositional strategies and methods can be detected in his most recent paintings, including Yesterday is Here Now, and Por qué? (Why?), with its boasting Pachuco-like personae, a testament to the equivocal status-seeking behavior that subculture subjects tend to adopt. Prenatal life crowns the symmetry of Nucleus, while wrapped figures in Leaving Miracles Behind and Docile Desires, both  suggest the placenta. In There is no Meaning, as well as in Silent Dreams of the Divine, the placenta seems to appear again, but perceived from within, as if enticing us into a broader, universal womb-envelope. These works, of course, are not incidental discoveries, but the result of multiple osmotic mutations activated by everchanging, complex realities. Their complex elements echo the formative years of an artist who has barely come of age— tracing his journey along the magnetic tracks of a tradition that continues to expand on the brink of another tumultuous century.