PAINTING HIMSELF OUT OF THE PICTURE
Serisier, Gillian. 2008. Artist Profile, issue 4, August: 61-63


Gillian Serisier: Your previous work has been characterised by a sombre darkness and introspection so I was very surprised by the work exhibited in The Lovely Season. This work has an incredible brightness and radiance, even a feeling of optimism. Is this a conscious change?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: Some previous cycles were mostly black; when figures appeared they were in profile. There was little engagement or invitations to interact. The coming of these colourful paintings and world-life scenes is something I resisted for years. I often see the landscapes as indifferent to the horrors and beauty of human concerns. I think my interest is in the temporary in relation to the absolute, and the world-life scenes play a role in that.

GS: The first painting encountered in the exhibition ‘The Valley’ engages this idea of uncertainty of existence via displaced layers and the cropping of the trees into a composition of line rather than a figurative depiction. Yet there is nothing smug or academic in the painting or what you have referred to as ‘the wink’ can you elaborate on this.

EMC: There is a tendency in modernism and post modernism to be in cahoots with the audience about rarefied knowledge—to wink—a wink of recognition that is less about secrets than about codes; codes that once decoded make the audience feel smart. For instance, Jeff Koons’s wink is saying ‘I’m not as tacky as all that...  I’m “in” on the joke.’ I’m aware the gesture of the sprouts coming out of my birch tree might be seen as charming or tacky but it is not a wink. I might be the joke but I am not ‘in’ on the joke.

GS: The physical layering interests me. It is much more apparent in the reality of the paintings, which in turn makes the metaphor of time’s progression more palpable. It seems that each painting contains a progression of seasons with winter occupying the proximal layers without denying the past seasons or life.

EMC: Time is in the layering of translucent wax and oil; in the materials and images being recovered and destroyed; in the reworking and reworking. Concerning the question of seasons, paintings are timeless but can be used to explore time. They bring time into the landscape and that—connecting time and the landscape—has been one my  main concerns. Particularly winter, which is purifying; its starkness fits my own expectations of painting.

GS: The Lovely Season?

EMC: Lovely is a word I hardly use.  After something has happened one chooses a word, ‘lovely,’ to reinterpret meaning. The season—a period of time, an event—might not have been lovely at all. ‘Lovely’ is a revision, a reinvention of what happened. Imposing the word ‘lovely’ colours memory but that colour brings up contention; whenever you see or remember something not so lovely, you have to rethink it – re-judge it, maybe find something that might have gone unobserved. Once you say ‘a lovely season’ we are forced to re-assess: was it actually a lovely season when this or that event occurred? ‘Lovely’ is an imposition onto experience.

GS: Umberto Eco uses semiotics to explore the disparity between memory and the past in a similar way; each layer is a shimmering version rather than a solid fact, is this the way your paintings interpret humanity’s ability to adapt and move forward?

EMC: This is important and difficult. Most comments on my work are about the content and the implied narrative but what mostly concerns me in my paintings has to do with small shifts in the painting itself. I’m interested in painting as inquiry and in the distinction between painting as a noun and as a verb. Paintings are objects whose meaning is unstable, undermined, and I’m interested in those paintings who acknowledge their apparent stability is not so sound.

GS: Are you dismayed by how literally people interpret your work?

EMC: Yes. I’m often surprised by how convinced people are of the images in my paintings and sculptures. For me they are less reliable. I use materials as tools to frame traces and instability— for me, to paint is to dislocate. That might be why the images you see in this exhibition—the boy or the birches—might not be here for the next show. My loyalty is to the thinking, the dislocation, not to the imagery. I have no allegiance to symbols.

GS: You have a background in science, yet unlike someone like Olafur Eliasson your work isn’t about science per se, but does your background in science revel itself in your work?

EMC: Coming from the world of science into art, it’s hard to be excited about art influenced by science. Working in physics I had the opportunity to see serious people at work and see first hand what a certain kind of intelligence looks like. After that, I’m not inclined to describe science-influenced entertainment as particularly visionary. I think art is most exciting when it’s more than paraphrasing something which can be said better in another way, in another field.

GS: The Longed-for Sun, seems to be a painting of that intersection.  There is an incredible luminosity in the sun that shifts through the painting’s layers and breaks the picture plane despite the extreme frontality of the figure.

EMC: The light coming through a window in a Vermeer is still there when you see it from six inches away. In “The Longed-for Sun,” the light becomes a smear as you approach the painting; it is no longer light, just paint. It’s unsatisfying as light and that dissatisfaction is revealing about paint and painting in general. Also the halo of the sun in that painting is reversed:  the red is in reversed position, yet one reads it as familiar. It’s inverted to work properly in the painting.

GS: Are you deliberately evoking Freud’s theories of the uncanny when you change the spectrum around?

EMC: Freud’s idea of the uncanny has been influential to my thinking. The sky going over the boy’s skin confuses the ‘before’ and ‘after.’ But this is not a strategy. The reason I don’t like surrealism is because it uses—with bad results—the uncanny as a strategy. The uncanny arises only in the friction of the expected, not in the puzzling or the freakish. For instance,Vilhelm Hammershøi makes uncanny paintings—say two open doors with no apparent subject. Emptiness and boredom could be the subject of those paintings but the uncanny arises in the flickering of the lack of subject and the insistence of the hidden. This suggest a question I think about often in writing and painting: can a non-event be interesting by not being interesting?— can I make meaning of a non-event? With the painting of the stump I was interested in making it as non-eventful as possible. I like to think that maybe the trajectory of my work is towards making mirrors, spaces with enough room for a stage where someone else can play a part.

GS: And what part will you play?

EMC: I will play the part of painting myself out of the painting.