Enrique Martinez Celaya

The Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman once said, "An artist paints so he has something to look at and sometimes an artist writes so he can have something to read." This statement expresses very well Enrique Martínez Celaya’s diverse visual and literary artistic practice. He deploys painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prose, and fiction to produce comprehensive aesthetic environments that explore the capacity of art to clarify and extend understanding of what the artist calls, "basic questions of existence."

Martínez Celaya’s work picks up philosophical, theological, and even scientific discourse about the nature of reality and experience, about the failure to "truly" understand while at the same time achieve some understanding. Although these environments function as discrete projects that might consist of works from a diversity of media dependent upon his intentions, they are momentary, temporary, tenuous answers to the existential questions he poses. Their cumulative relationship derives from the pressure these past answers impose on the present.

This approach bears the influence of Heidegger’s quest for the ground of Being and Kierkegaard’s reflections on the wager and risk of faith. But at its essence, the reductive clarity of his visual vocabulary reveals his work to be profoundly poetic in nature. Neither an "abstract" nor a "representational" painter, the familiar images that emerge in Martínez Celaya’s surfaces, such as trees, solitary human figures, streams, landscapes, and flowers are best understood as "concrete" or "objective" subjects that open the viewer onto an expansive vista of experience. This compact vision, which pushes familiar objects and images beyond their familiarity, finds its correlation in the prose of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the poetry of the German Jew Paul Celan, Lithuanain Tomas Venclova, and, most recently the Swede Harry Martinson, and Russian Osip Mandelstam.

His most recent projects, shown in Japan, New York, Aspen, Miami and San Francisco, have gravitated around Kierkegaard, Martinson and Mandelstam, whom Martínez Celaya uses to frame his questions. These recent environments are predominantly very large paintings made with glazes of oil and wax, a layering process that bestows on the work a luminous and mysterious quality that contrasts sharply with the rawness of his handling of paint. Characteristic of this recent painting is the predominance of this glowing light, a light that, following Heidegger, "discloses" experience.