DETROIT, MI — February 21, 2019 — Reyes | Finn is pleased to open its new home in downtown Detroit with Senior Coconut, a three-person exhibition featuring new works by Eddie Martinez, Gerasimos Floratos, and Rafael Delacruz. The exhibition opens to the public on Friday, March 15, 2019, from 6-8 PM.

These three artists play with abstraction and the surreal, commanding colorful palettes to create gestural figures.  Often unnerving the composition with the unexpected or unfamiliar, they blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction with dizzying and hypnotic results.

Featured in the exhibition will be new paintings and drawings by Martinez, created following his solo exhibition in the fall of 2018 at at the Bronx Museum, seven paintings and eleven drawings by Delacruz, as well as new paintings and works on paper by Floratos.

Eddie Martinez (b.1977), Groton, Connecticut 

Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez draws inspiration from a wide-range of sources, spanning from popular urban culture to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism.  Martinez's work joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways.  Imbued with a sense of personal iconography, his practice often combines signature figurative elements, such as bug-eyed humans and eclectic headgear with gestural, abstract blocks of color.  Energetic and raw, his paintings employ an aggressive use of color and texture with various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint and collage elements on canvas.  Martinez also produces large and small-scale abstract sculpture, made mostly from found materials such as rubber hoses, Styrofoam, cardboard, and metal scraps sourced from wherever the artist is working at the time. 

Eddie Martinez was born in 1977 in Groton, Connecticut and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo museum exhibitions include The Bronx Museum, New York (2018); The Drawing Center, New York (2017) and The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA (2017).  He has also had solo exhibitions at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2014); Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Half Gallery, New York (2014); and Journal Gallery, New York (2013). His work has also been exhibited in various group exhibitions at The Saatchi Gallery, London (2013) and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011).  Additionally, Martinez’s work has been featured in Modern Painters, ARTINFO, The New York Times, ArtReview, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. Martinez has an upcoming solo exhibition at The Bronx Museum, New York in November of 2018.  

 Gerasimos Floratos (b.1986) New York, NY

A first generation Greek American and native New Yorker, Gerasimos Floratos’ paintings and sculptures play with the idea of site specificity and the notion of what it means to be ‘rooted’ in a single place. His works employ psycho-figurative bodies as mechanisms for charting space in many forms; psychogeography of the globalised world, societies or microcosms built through commonalities of practice, and the internal space of the mind. For the artist, the slouchy alter egos present throughout his work operate as sites for exploring the relationship between the material and psychological bodies. The coded visual language present throughout his practice is partnered with a unique lexicon from which he draws titles for the works and exhibitions.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Slangwich Motel, Schloss, Oslo (2018); Soft Bone Journey, Armada, Milan (2017); Big Town, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2016); White Columns, New York City (2016). His work has been included in recent group shows at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2018); Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2018); Salon 94, New York City (2016); The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn (2016).

Rafael Delacruz (b. 1989) San Francisco, CA

Rafael Delacruz brings a more distinct storytelling along with a renegade satire. It is all brushwork on canvas, so it should be very traditional and straightforward, yet you can sense the feel of the digitized world. That’s because he undulates between parallel versions of the same image both inside and outside the computer, distorting and morphing the image and then executing that with the brush. This digital manipulation creates a tension in the work that brings them to surprising places. In the canvases we often see a dystopian landscape with a dear character living a nomadic existence or cars that appear as homes. Delacruz touches on self-reflection through identity with humor and absurdity.

Rafael Delacruz (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has had solo shows at Goldies Gallery, New York; Et Al, San Francisco; Rachel Uffner, New York and The Middler, Brooklyn. His work has been included in group and two person exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; Cheim & Read, New York; Loyal Gallery Stockholm; Shoot The Lobster, Los Angeles; The Loon, Toronto; Pilar Corrias, London; American Medium, Brooklyn; The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn; Oakland Museum of Art, among others. Delacruz holds a BFA in Film Theory from San Francisco State University .