Martinez doodles with a Sharpie, then blows up the sketch. The muscularity of his lines echoes his experience as a graffiti artist, and he walks a path between drawing and painting pioneered by Cy Twombly.

The black lines retain the doodle’s nonchalance, but the scale raises the stakes. Martinez fills in, paints over and around with self-effacing colors like avocado green and wan tomato red. He sprays, dabs, smudges and presses paint — his textures agitate, as do his rough, jagged lines. He tacks on bits of cloth. His signature, a bold “EM,” is part of the spiraling game board, too. 

The exhibition, titled Ants at a Picknic, which is on view until December 17, 2017, includes a series of new, frenetic large-scale mandala paintings, 17 tabletop painted bronze sculptures and drawings on paper. “The works in Ants at a Picknic make plain that Martinez has hit his stride,” said Dr. Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 director of the Davis Museum and curator of the exhibition. “The cosmic hooks, the summoning of spirits, the virtuoso line, the command of color and composition — it all adds up to its own kind of brilliance.”