His atelier is a former movie theater built in the Black Bahamian village during the days of racial segregation. After integration in 1965 the huge, high space was lived in by a witch, then by whores, then it briefly became the Martin Luther King Junior church. Later it was abandoned for a number of years until Martini bought it in 1985. He is one of the few whites in the neighborhood. Though by now he's become friendly with everyone up and down his street. The neighbor's roosters start calling around three in the morning. In a high wind palm fronds scrape against the sheet metal roof.
Martini lives in Key West year round, even during the hot sticky summers which last from May to November. Because he is used to dealing with the summer heat he works at night. He usually begins his work after nightfall and continues until the roosters remind him the dawn has come. In the summer the island reverts to its past. So few cars go by that a cat falls asleep in the middle of the road. People sit in swings on their porch, sip ice tea and chat. Everyone dozes. No wonder that the locals are called "conchs" after those shellfish that creep across the ocean floor.
To enter Martini's atelier at night is to interrupt a voodoo seance. The light is dim, a shadowy throng has gathered, and the mood is one of bewitched concentration. Dozens of very tall figures, cut out of scrap metal with a blowtorch, fill the immense space. Sometimes the metal was painted industrially and traces of the original color remain, but usually the hues are just those of steel and rust. The faces seldom define sharply differentiated individuals; rather they are the masks of interchangeable tribal members. Since the metal pipes Martini often uses are round, the concave sections that end up as sculpture become two or three figures turning in a dance or a single figure at once flat and rounded, flat because no features can protrude beyond the uniform surface of the metal, rounded because the pipe is curved.
If Martini's work has mostly been influenced by latin America (the Mexican Day of the Dead) and the Caribbean (Hatian metal cut-outs one would suspect), nevertheless it also has antecedents in the sculpture of this century (Giacometti and David Smith are his favorite modern masters) and even in the ancient Etruscan sculpture that looks as though it inspired Giacometti. Recently Martini was impressed by the Byzantine church sculpture in Ravenna. Martini travels in Europe and through the islands, notebook in hand, and is quick to sketch forms that speak to his sensibility.
But it would be a mistake to overemphasize the ethnographic or intellectual aspects of the oeuvre. When martini works he goes into a sort of meditation and loses all sense of time. In his huge old cinema palace he bodies forth the flickerings of his imagination, the shadows on the walls of his Platonic cave. He's begun to make furniture--a chair of which the back is a human face, the legs his arms and legs. Recently he's invented a stand in for himself, Bob, a guy with a hat. Many of Bob's adventures, including the survival of a hurricane are obliquely autobiographical. These narrative sculptures are horizontal.
Half of Martini's sculptures end up in gardens, often the semi-tropical gardens of the Keys in which banana trees attain their full height in a year beside palms and orange and grapefruit trees, not to mention the sculptural forms of a giant cactus, the night-blooming cereus. Martini himself is a nocturnal being, silently working, deeply entranced in his abandoned cinema in a garden full of roosters and palms.