Enrique Martínez Celaya
Enrique Martínez Celaya served as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist from September 17-21, 2018. Martínez Celaya is an artist and former scientist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world, as well as the author of books and papers in art, poetry, philosophy, and physics. He has created projects and exhibitions for the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, among many others, as well as for institutions outside of the art world, including the Berliner Philharmonie, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (New York), and the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery (Berlin). His work is held in public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Moderna Museet (Stockholm); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut).
Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He initiated his formal training as an apprentice to a painter at the age of 12 and developed what became an enduring interest in writing and philosophy in the turbulent Puerto Rican cultural and political environment of the 1970s. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics with a minor in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and a Master of Science with a specialization in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Regents Fellow. He conducted part of his graduate research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and while there, he painted the Long Island landscape.
He has published scientific papers on superconductivity and lasers and is the inventor of several patented laser devices. He has lectured at venues around the world including the New York Public Library, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Aspen Institute. He is an artist advisor at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center and previously served on its Board of Trustees.
Martínez Celaya has worked in collaboration with scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, and architects, including the Canadian rock-band, Cowboy Junkies, the poet and Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann, and the novelist Mary Rakow.
PROOF essay by Laura Mart, associate curator, Skirball Cultural Center
“An artwork challenges you with a million questions back to yourself” - Enrique Martínez Celaya
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s artistic practice revolves around uncovering layers of the self. His creative process is a deeply intertwined discourse between painting, writing, and reading, uncovering meaning through reflections on philosophy, poetry, and personal memory. Working primarily in painting, Martínez Celaya also creates sculptural works, prints, prose, and poetry. Through his introspective works, he mines his own experience to physicalize emotional spaces, which suspend between time and place as they reconstitute his perceptions and recollections. These oneiric, mysterious scenes permeate into the realm of the collective psyche despite their deeply personal referents.
In The Mirrored Dinosaur, created in 2019 at Island Press, Martínez Celaya draws from an episode in his own life to reflect on themes of masculinity, parenthood, devotion, isolation, identity, and self-examination. The print combines black-and-white photographic imagery with a visceral intrusion of color and a short phrase evoking the remembered scene memorialized in the work: “filtered by dirt, the light that dripped to the basement window came through stained, tired.” As in Martínez Celaya’s paintings, the emotional resonance of each of the objects in the room emerges through sustained examination. The ad-hoc domestic interior feels temporary and unsettled, a space for disparate users and activities that do not usually share the same room. A weight rack and bench share space with a child’s bed sporting pillows patterned with dinosaurs and a fine rug. A mirrored wall has the unsettling effect of multiplying the entire scene in fragmented panels. The setup is at the same time intimate and alienating. Feelings of discomfort and unfamiliarity arise out of the disjointedness of the domestic space, and viewed through the foggy frame of memory, the scene takes on an air of desolation and displacement.
Collage-like, the print incorporates disparate elements of photograph, written text, and the painterly markmaking through the techniques of photo transfer, collagraph, and chine collé. Among print techniques, collagraphy has a particular allure for Martínez Celaya, achieving the palpable materiality that is a key characteristic of his painted surfaces. The central photograph is bounded by and intruded upon by a frame of dark red collagraph that seeps hazily into the photograph, refusing to stay put, its sinewy, dark red marks recalling blood and muscle fibers - the stuff of family bonds and the idealized strength of manhood - that fade into pink as the frame spills into the rug in the photo. In its streaky physicality, the textured collagraph frame draws on the painterly language of the open, tangible strokes of Martínez Celaya’s canvases, as the photograph provides a glimpse of personal memory that surfaces repeatedly in his other works.
Despite the intimate specificity of the personal photograph, the possibility arises that we too, as viewers, inhabit these kinds of transitional spaces. Through the haze of Martínez Celaya’s memory we arrive at a place where we can examine the basements of our own lives, where uncomfortable emotions of fatigue, unsettledness, and questioning echo just below the surface.
