INTERVIEW WITH ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA
Fox, Howard N. 2001. Pages 77-89 in Enrique Martínez Celaya 1992-2000.
Wienand, Cologne, Germany.


Howard Fox: This evening we are privileged to be in the company of truly an exceptional artist. Based here in Los Angeles, Enrique Martínez Celaya has produced a body of work that has commanded a great deal of respect internationally among critics and collectors alike. Last year LACMA elected to represent Martínez Celaya in the permanent collection with a remarkable painting, Acceptance of Longing, 1997--a poetically evocative work steeped in Surrealism, high Romanticism, and Modern painterly abstraction; a large painting that features the image of a dead hummingbird. Doubtless you've all seen it on exhibition at the museum, where it has a powerful presence in the galleries.

And yet, for all its visceral presence, that painting, with its palette of glinting whites and cool grays, feels very elusive, sliding in and out of our visual and mental perceptions. And that, I feel, is very typical of Enrique's distinctive, exquisite aesthetics of shifting and eliding--what could be called a 'quantum' aesthetics. I'll try to explain: Enrique Martínez Celaya's art is not only about ambiguity and mystery, although it certainly is steeped in those qualities; but it is also about simultaneity and duality, as his art mediates between art and philosophy, between visible and invisible truths. His paintings seem, like a quantum particle, to have the uncanny and incomprehensible nature of existing in two places and in different states simultaneously. As you look at Enrique Martínez Celaya's latest works surrounding us here tonight, I think you'll agree that they suggest something stridently present and palpable yet equally mysterious, even sublime. And maybe the analogy to quantum physics is not so far fetched.

Enrique Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba, studied in Europe and the United States, and made his way here to Los Angeles. Enrique, tell us a little bit about your biography, your migration here, and also your scholastic background. I know that you did not study originally to be a painter, but that you graduated with a degree in science.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: As a child, I was an apprentice for a painter who did mostly landscapes and portraits. But in high school, my attraction to physics and mathematics made science a more desirable pursuit as a career. I went to Cornell to study physics; specifically, quantum physics, and then did research at Brookhaven before going to graduate school. I always painted, but in my second year of graduate studies, I realized that I wanted to be an artist. So, for a while, I was pursuing two graduate degrees at the same time.

HF: Let's explore that just a little bit. How did you make this radical decision? What were you doing in your studio at the same time that you were doing physics research and writing your papers and everything? How did you reconcile this departure? Or, perhaps in your mind, it was not such a departure from what you were already doing?

EMC: At the time, I was working in an area of research that requires the same kind of extrapolations and leaps of faith that you may associate with the arts. I never thought of the duality of my graduate studies as strange; I never saw it as a duality at all. The real problem came from hearing too many opinions about what I should do...so I left the art and physics programs at UC Berkeley. I lived in Oakland, working on my own and selling my work in the parks of San Francisco with the Artists' Guild.

HF: I have a sense that 'science'--in the ancient sense of knowledge and human understanding, and the attempt to discern truth--in some way relates to your work. I was reading an article by a mathematician who was speculating on whether mathematics is an invention of man or whether it exists in nature, independent of humankind. In other words, a kind of ideal order, or natural law, if you will--very abstract concepts that seem to intercept physical reality. Does this, in any way, inflect or inform your art?

EMC: Nature is a building with an invisible exterior and we live on the inside. Science and mathematics are a scaffolding that facilitates investigations on the structure as well as one of the best things we have to make any inferences about its shape. The scaffolding is made by us but as it becomes finer and more flexible it resembles the building which is not constructed by us. It could become difficult to distinguish between what reveals the building and what inherently is the building. These questions profoundly affect my work and they are very relevant in contemporary art.

HF: So much of contemporary art often looks theoretical, as if it were an exercise in an idea about art that is carried out almost as a clinical pursuit, not unlike a scientific inquiry in a laboratory. Many artists position themselves to respond to something that other artists have said before to advance to the next phase in a critical dialectic. But this is not the kind of 'science' I'm describing in your work. For you there seems to be more of a search for some intuitively discerned higher or deeper truth that's not about some current discourse in the art world. So much contemporary art that is formulated as a specific response to critical discourse seems hermetic. And I think that to many viewers such art appears, rightly or wrongly, to have very little to do with the world at large or what they experience in their own lives.

EMC: Many people involved in contemporary art think that the construct of culture is not only the means, but also the end. Most scientists, on the other hand, think that the tools of science are a construct but the end is not.

HF: I think that your work mediates those realms--the very worldly and whatever is not worldly. Let's talk about some of your paintings. These pieces (The Empty Garden, 1998 and Pena (Sorrow), 1998) suggest mortality, possibly violence, anger, the intrusion of some rude force into the way life is lived. Is there struggle in your work? Is there anguish?

EMC: Most of the time, pursuing a resonant and moving work is a struggle. And because of this, there is violence and anguish, not only in the images, but also in the process. I am trying to hold violence close enough to remain urgent but distant enough to see it and, in the process, make objective what is extremely subjective. Memory, for example, is one of those ideas that is violent, difficult and subjective. I want to know what memories do, how time erodes them and what or who is the 'me' that is doing the inventory of the past.

HF: You mean, not specific memories, but the activity of the imagination, just left alone to contemplate itself?

EMC: Yes, but I do not usually think of imagination as involved in this process. I am seeking a clearer vision and that leads me to objectify and separate the subjective from myself. This is neither about sentimentality nor about detachment, both of those positions are very easy to understand but not very revealing.

HF: The fact that your paintings resist very specific interpretation is exactly the response that you are eliciting from the viewer.

EMC: Yes, but this is because the works are an experience that is not readily available as a simple pointer. It is not about confusion.

HF: It's wonderment, not confusion.

EMC: Yes, but focused. This preoccupation started for me with religious paintings. In religious paintings, the entire human being was the destination for the work, not the mind or the heart. The religious work wants to suggest some experience that is extremely clear but unnamable.

HF: I think you intend something very similar to happen to the viewer. We have some questions from the audience.

AUDIENCE: I understand this as a sort of spirituality that you're seeking. Does any of this have to do with the Revolution in Cuba? I mean, in the view that this experience happened, is that part of this anguish and violence?

EMC: When I left Cuba, I understood what that meant to other people, and later, what that meant to myself. The exile facilitated the possibility of the world at certain costs. It is a persisting struggle to remain unexplained as a foreigner. Everyone seems to know better. I do not long for spirituality or reason as an answer to my condition of exile. Culture and politics are not directly the subject of my work. All the issues of culture and politics always have their struggles in the individual. I am interested in the person. If you wish, you can see all my works as an examination of the idea of selfportraiture separated from the autobiographical. In the process of working I disappear.

HF: As long as you're talking about disappearance, let's talk about your palette, the almost bleached faint feeling that your images often have, as if they're fading into a space or time or they're just coalescing out of it. You do have some use of bright and saturated colors in your canvases, mostly associated with blood-red. But most often you have a very grayish, ashy white or a dark, inky black. Sometimes the whites are ethereal and can almost 'snow-blind' you, while the blacks are often dense and unfathomable. Everything seems to fade in and out of vision. At least that's how your palette works for me.

EMC: In 1990, I was trying to reinvent painting for myself. The fastest way I found to dismantle the way I worked was to take out what people said was interesting about paintings. I took out drawing, I took out color, I took out what people had complimented in my paintings, to see what was left. I was left with black and white, and red, which seems like a form of black and white. So I have tried to keep the options in these paintings very rigid on purpose. I think that if you keep the structure of the paintings very rigid then you can take huge liberties within them.

HF: You've described 'reinventing' painting for yourself and working within a rigid structure. I get the impression, in looking at your work, that structure is like a visual language with its own vocabulary and syntax--a language that is personal to you yet rooted in Western art and iconography, so that it has resonance for viewers. Is this a fair impression, that your painting strives to the condition of language? Does language somehow edify your art?

EMC: Language exists in my work, in the books that are published and the poems that are included in the exhibitions. But, I do not think of my visual pieces as a language, or even as constructed in language. Instead, I see them as objects, concepts and images that exist as an experience. This experience is not a private language nor is it translatable to language. Images and gestures re-appear in the work but not as parts of a hieroglyph. They, perhaps like trees in a forest, are different and the same in each encounter. Some of the ideas in my work have interested many people before me and that is why my exploration seems to connect with the Western tradition of art and literature, and even folklore.

HF: Speaking of paintings in terms of language also underscores another impression that your art is very literary--'poetical' and 'lyrical' are words that many people have used to describe your art. And you are a poet and a great reader of books and a literary publisher in addition to being a visual artist. Is your painting and sculpture steeped in literature? Who are the writers or philosophers who've influenced your art?

EMC: I did not look at anyone's paintings other than Leonardo's until I was twelve. I was not interested in art. When I started painting I did it to understand myself. In contrast, I read everyone I could find. It was through literature that I began to understand the world. Literature became a much better model for my work than visual art and it was more or less free of the burden of commodity and 'look'. I sought physics and philosophy to better understand where I was but I always came back to art and literature as a way to internalize and to clarify experience. And about your question of influences, I am in debt to a very a long list of writers and philosophers but naming them often misleads more than reveals. I have not figure out a way to talk about these things in a way that is useful.

AUDIENCE: Your paintings, and also your drawings, are absolutely elegant in the way you painted them. It's just a formal thing, but you're very conscious of the kind of surface, are you not, that the paintings have?

EMC: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Very careful use of accidents.

EMC: I work with accidents in all the works. I create situations for them to occur. But once they occur, I spend a lot of time deciding whether I could live with them or not. I am very conscious of the surfaces and everything that ends up in these paintings. And often, they are much more superficially appealing before I finish.

HF: How so?

EMC: They have more of what people often seek in paintings. A moving work is sometimes encumbered by the issues of the visual, and paintings have the burden of being caught up in the decorative.

AUDIENCE: What is the relationship that you're looking for between the images of the head and the tree in Quiet Night (Marks)?

EMC: Well, in general, the objects in my works are elemental: trees, birds, heads, the sky, figures, arms, mirrors, water. They are fragments of the forest which I mentioned earlier. These are the fundamental building blocks of experience. So, in the juxtaposition between the birches and the head something new will emerge, something that was maybe hidden by appearances. So the relationships between these things are not really intended to be poetic, as in 'flowery', but as in essential to some truth.

AUDIENCE: I'm curious why you don't leave in the emotional side...you just leave the chronic, the violent. Could you comment?

EMC: I leave the emotional side. But the emotional side is not the same thing as the sentimental side. The sentimental is not specific. What's left in emotion once you remove affectation from it? I am after a state that breaks the barrier between intellect and feelings.

HF: I think you've succeeded in that, Enrique. Characteristically, your work has an almost monastic quality about it. It's disciplined in its austerity, in it's editing, as you've just described. What you decide to leave out--that is, the veneer, the allure of cheap sentiment--rather than allow to reside or preside in the painting, alludes by its absence to something vague and unknowable, but something perhaps absolute, or sublime. When we look at the powerful image of this head--and to me this is the essential Martínez Celaya painting, and I've seen quite a few of them--you set forth a visual symbol of intelligence, an icon of thought and every emotion and intellectual aspiration. Yet absent the rest of the body, the head appears severed, suggesting mortality. And then there's this reddish utterance coming from its mouth. I've heard you describe paint as something that has to be spilled. But in this image it's also what comes from being human: it's the utterance, the wonder that is expressed to possibly nobody or to no thing but the void beyond. Is it an absolute? Is it a construct? It's not answered in these paintings. It's the aching question perpetually asked in your art.

^† This text is transcribed and edited from a program at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, Venice, California, on December 14, 1999, for members of the Modern and Contemporary Art Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.