the vast chasm of life
by Douglas Messerli
Enrique
Martínez Celaya Lone Star / L. A.
Louver gallery, Venice, Los Angeles, April 9-May 16, 2015, I attended the
opening evening reception on April 9.
Artist
Enrique Martínez Celaya begins his newest installed environment, Lone Star, with an image of a tearful
young male, surrounded with mirrors, his tears collecting into a pool of
sorrow, banked and framed by a mound of what appears to be some kind
vegetation, but apparently is made up of bird-seed. A typed flier that
accompanies this show observes:
On the evening of a turbulent
day in my childhood I searched
the night sky for something in
myself that was adrift and
looking at those stars and at the abyss of
nothingness between
them, I felt both a piercing awareness of
selfhood and an equally
intense sense of self-negation. Although I had
considered that
dome of stars many times before, it had never seemed
as relevant
to who I was nor as distant from my life, but what
struck me
most was the awe and dread I sensed at facing the
mystery of
the vast hole above me.
The artist does not explain what triggered
that day of such immense turbulence and poetic longing or at what age and in
which country he experienced these sensations. Born in Cuba in 1964, Martínez
Celaya was uprooted at the age of 8 when his family moved to Spain, only three
years later forced to transfer again to Puerto Rico. Such vast shifts in
cultural landscape might alone have set off the romantic-like wanderings of
mind and self-reflection that dominate this artist’s work. His intense feeling
of isolation against the vastness of the universe is apparent once again in
this beautifully realized show of interconnected works of art.
Art, for Martinez Celaya is obviously redeeming
in the sense that Arthur Schopenhauer—one of the artist’s constant
touchstones—argues for it, as a way to escape the suffering and pain of the
world through the sublimation of the self by enacting with the world rather than
merely perceiving it. And that body of created art, as with Melville’s heavily
tattooed character Queequeg, becomes not just a body of work but a tracing upon
the body itself of what one’s life has meant, a “mystery” “destined in the
end to moulder away with the living parchment” of the body of the artist
himself, “and so be unsolved to the last.”
If the sculpted boy can only cry in
despair and wonderment, the other canvases and constructions of Martínez Celaya’s
new show, while representing the tensions inherent in life, proffer
possibilities for transcending that childhood pain. The vast, startlingly blooming
tree set against a desert-like landscape and billowing clouds of The Sigh (2015) might almost create that
sensation in the viewer when he first catches it in his glance. What looks to
be an empty bottle set against another autumnal landscape of The Ballad of What Is Yours (2015),
reminds us also of Schopenhauer’s Hamburg birthplace, an image which again
appears upstairs in L. A. Louver gallery in The
Nursery, a kind of childhood-inspired bird cage in which sits a brightly feathered
bird, a stack of Schopenhauer’s pages from his famed treatise The World as Will and Representation
sitting beside it, with a few pages of it also wittily lining the bottom of the
cage itself. 
In The
Border (2015) we observe what appear to be birds but which might also be
blackened cacti atop of block of crystalized ice, suggesting various notions of
“borders”: climatic (cold and warm), representational (birds or blooms of cacti),
color (black and white), and temporal (day and night).
If the young boy of The Invisible (or the Power of Forbearance) of the first room is
utterly disconsolate, in The Prince
(2015) a similar adolescent stretches his hands upward to the leaves of a tree,
hinting of athletic and sexual prowess, which is connected (again with the written
material the artist has provided) with the image of a skate, which Martínez
Celaya describes in poetic terms as “Water-ravens. Impatient. All eyes. /
Slimy, like vaginas. Smelly, like sheets soaked in urine,” and which upstairs in
the gallery space he employs again in the image of a boy lying with his head
upon the beast in The Relic and the Pure
(2015).
Again and again throughout this
narratively suggestive installation, birds appear in oil and wax in The Grateful (2015) and virtually in the
sculptural internment of a caged child upon which five birds rest, The Treasure of the Patient (2015).
Houses too are cages, the artist reminds us, and the world itself is glass. The
birds, for this artist-poet, represent a new beginning, producing as they do a
song (for Schopenhauer music was the greatest of the arts) that directs the
mind and imagination away from the self-referential reflections of despair
suffered by that troubled adolescent who suddenly discovered himself in the
vast chasm of life.
Los Angeles,
April 14, 2015
