ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA
ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 THE FOREIGNER’S SONG
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A map is an interpretation. A map is a guess. Maps mirror desire. Anything can be a map, and a map can be anything.
A map is a proposition to steer by. Maps tend to be granted the same kind of authority and stable meaning as photo graphs. They invite implicit trust, and rarely announce their partiality, imperfection, or incompleteness. Nothing about them is neutral.
SIX POINTS ON THE PROVISIONAL MAP OF THE EVER-CHANGING SKY AND UNFURLING POEM THAT IS THE WORK OF ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA
By Leah Ollman the map itself We speak of a sense of place, but we only ever mean a sense of ourselves. Whether the disparate pieces of ourselves feel in place or out of place has something, but not everything, to do with place itself. Where we locate ourselves depends on how we conduct the search, what kind of map we reach for, what it is that we need.
The maps appearing in these paintings by Enrique Martínez Celaya conjure the exoskeleton that a geographical site provides, the shell or shelter supporting life’s vulnerable flesh. These maps, however, also read as the opposite: as internal structures, networks of arteries channeling vital fluids—blood, sap, water. Friction between conditions that seem mutually exclusive—exteriority/interiority, vastness/ intimacy, sel ood/otherness—thrums constantly in Martínez Celaya’s work.
1. Enrique Martínez Celaya, Collected Writings & Interviews, 2010-2017 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), p. 39
Other maps, by other hands, might identify starting point, route, destination, or destiny. The maps that look like city maps in Martínez Celaya’s paintings do, indeed, correspond to specific locales, but their place-names are withheld. Particular biographical references have, as he puts it in describing his process of writing as a prelude to painting, been burned away.1 The maps resist practical utility and instead se le in as symbol or metaphor, denoting placelessness more than place. They invoke a search, the search for the elusive self, the yearning to resolve restlessness with belonging.
2. “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” in Poems of Nazim Hikmet, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, trans., New York: Persea Books, 2002, pp. 261-264.
In one of Martínez Celaya’s paintings on paper, the starry sky rises like a shared thought from the heads of two figures standing side by side. In another work, on canvas, a staircase hovers in indeterminate space, its surface and substance nothing but light-flecked darkness.
We look to the night sky to clarify our position, to know our place. Our place is never just one place, and the map that is the night sky delivers not a single answer but a simultaneous multiplicity, the very multiplicity that we live, and that lives in us.
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“Everythinglexicon that ma ers is secret,” Martínez Celaya has said. “The best we can do is to create approximations.”3 I recognize the sense of una ainability. Every entry in my ongoing response to his work over the past 25 years is a rough dra , subject to the same wiping away and reformulating, again and again, as the surfaces of his canvases.
Verbs, I think, ma er more than nouns to Martínez Celaya. The dynamic forces at play are of continual, urgent a ention, how meaning is determined, rather than what that meaning is purported to be but he adopts a deceptively declarative stance, always employing the definite article, the, to ground his titles (The Island, The Thin Line, The Angel of The Wait) and typically placing the forms on his canvas, front and center, plain to see and easy to read. A loose glossary of images and tendencies has emerged over time, and something of a grammar, reliant on the tension, as ever,
The starry sky splays promise, endless potential. And it dwarfs our very hopes.
4 the night sky
The stars, in the work of Martínez Celaya, and in the words of the poet Nazim Hikmet, “are our endless desire to grasp things.”
3. Collected Writings & Interviews, p. 107
The stars are a source of orientation, and the deep, expansive darkness is an emblem of our disorientation. Protective canopy, embracing dome, the starry sky offers comfort. Daunting abyss, rendering us small, untethered and alone, it ampli fies our desolation.
The stars are traces of the ancient past, hints of the unformed future. They are the beyond, and the within.
TheClearingHomePathexilic condition, a ma er of hungering for truth, constructing it Truth, as an “evolving event” the recognition and advancement of it
5 between divergent, concurrent states—fixed and fluid, clarity and unknowability, familiarity and strangeness. Within Martínez Celaya’s lexicon, nouns activate as verbs; principles and intentions are shaped and reshaped, in paint, bronze, and words.
Thepoemyoung men in Martínez Celaya’s work are sometimes charged with daunting loads, a house strapped on the back, a pair of stars dragged by a tether. One story of the artist’s life is in that hauling, that baggage, but the paintings are not mem oir. They are poems, by his own account as well as my experience. Distilled, and 4. Enrique Martínez Celaya, On Art and Mindfulness: Notes from the Anderson Ranch (Culver City, CA: Whale & Star Press in collaboration with Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 2015), p. 33
Cynicism’sFullnessInstabilityUrgencyChoice damaging emptiness UnrestIntimacyTearsMemoryLoveLossLoneliness
4 Radiance,InnocenceDoubt
“A poem by its nature operates beyond rational control. . . . A poem means you’re in too deep,” Kay Ryan states.6 C.D. Wright concurs: “Poetry is speech by someone who is in trouble.”
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6 yet immense in scope. Glimpses of the private, the peculiar, the unshakable. In his work, as in poetry, the singular sensibility is all, however many forms of I it assumes.
These words are wri en on a blue shop towel that is push pinned to the wall of Martínez Celaya’s studio beside one of the paintings-in-progress for this show. The painting is of a slim boy standing alone, facing out, facing us. His skin is bone-white, and he wears nothing but a sort of underpant fashioned from a spo ed pelt, which I take to be a talisman conferring animal strength and power to this fragile soul. A fragmented map, all skeins and la ice, faces us, too, an intermediary plane between the boy and u er darkness.
Martínez Celaya o en refers to his childhood as suffused with a sense of deficit. He didn’t know things that he felt he should, things everyone else seemed to compre hend instinctively. He looked to philosophy, literature, science, and art for answers. Those were the maps he reached for, to identify his place and to articulate his path.
Martínez Celaya considers risk integral to his pursuits. Desperation, too. He may wonder aloud who his peers are in the realm of the visual arts, but he adopts, with the relief that kinship brings, a long list of poets as ancestors, mentors, and guides: Robert Frost, Paul Celan, Jorges Luis Borges, Osip Mandelstam, Harry Martinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Marina Tsvetaeva, and more. “it is about navigation”
If this seems a dilution, a distancing, it isn’t. The stakes are high.
To make sense of a changing self in a shi ing home in a world of veiled truths.
6. Kay Ryan, Synthesizing Gravity (New York: Grove Press, 2020), p. 179.
Subjectivity transcends the subject; subjectivity is the subject. The I of Martínez Celaya’s lone boys, like the I on the poet’s page, is voiced in what Sam Hamill terms the “first person impersonal.”5
7. C. D. Wright, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016), p. 28.
5. Sam Hamill, A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry (Sea le: Broken Moon Press, 1990).
8. Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything (Los Angeles: USC Fisher Museum of Art, January 19–April 9, 2022).
Each version, each vision of Martínez Celaya’s map, his poem, yields something vital. Each iteration is dense with a material and ideational history of its own making.
The relentless drive to understand the truths of his own ongoingness is what fuels his work, its acts of essaying and sense-making, his navigating and mapping.
The work of such mapping is the work of living, the work of remaining awake to the presentness of the past, to the irreconcilable chill within the heat.
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9. On Art and Mindfulness, p. 48. Leah Ollman writes for Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. She has contributed essays and interviews for books on Julie Blackmon, Klea McKenna, William Kentridge, Betye Saar, Alison Rossiter, Christine Corday, and Michael Light. She is working on a book exploring the intersection of poetry and photography.
Recently, Martínez Celaya subtitled an exhibition of his work: towards a map of everything 8 In the audacity of those words, he again summoned friction—between aspiration and the impossibility of its fulfillment, between necessity and futility. He admits to his own unreasonableness, and he just as readily owns his extreme tenac ity. His decades-long, cross-media inquiry has consistently centered on one thing— who he is in the world—and that one thing encompasses everything.
And through all of Martínez Celaya’s probing of place, placelessness, and displace ment, our own questions loosen. Where do these images find us? How do they reach us? Where do we stand? If we follow his lead, and approach art honestly, fearlessly— “Be where you are. Do not borrow a stance. Do not pretend.”9 —his reckonings might just spur our own.
One thing his work never offers is false consolation. again, the map
12 El principio y el final (The Beginning and The End), 2018–2022 Oil, wax, tar and silk flowers on canvas 82 x 75 inches 208.3 x 190.5 cm
14 La escalera (The Stairs), 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 70 x 63 inches 177.8 x 160 cm
16 La gran marcha (The Great March), 2022 Ink and watercolor on paper and ink print, with childhood pastel drawing by the artist 49 x 37 inches 124.5 x 94 cm
18 Los dientes de león (The Dandelions), 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 57 x 51 inches 144.8 x 129.5 cm
20 The Angel of The Wait, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 70 x 63 inches 177.8 x 160 cm
22 The Eternal Stain, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas and wood 92 x 147 inches 233.7 x 373.4 cm
24 The Ice-Bound Carriage, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 132 x 82 inches 335.3 x 208.3 cm
26 The Island, 2015-2022 Oil and wax on canvas 102 x 124 inches 259.1 x 315 cm
28 The Loveless and The Loved, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 92 x 118 inches 233.7 x 299.7 cm
30 The Showing (for C.M.), 2022 Ink and watercolor on paper 32 x 22 inches 81.3 x 55.9 cm
32 The Swarm, 2022 Ink and watercolor on paper 43 1/2 x 32 inches 110.5 x 81.3 cm
34 The Thin Line, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 70 x 63 inches 177.8 x 160 cm
36 The Traveler’s Dream, 2022 Oil and wax on canvas 120 x 63 inches 304.8 x 160 cm
Visual2019 Arts Fellow, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
National2007 Artist Award, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, CO
International2018 Advisory Council, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, NY Fellow,2017 Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Fellow,2020 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, Carmel-ByThe-Sea, CA Doctor Honoris Causa, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CommencementCAAddress Speaker, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA
California2001 Community Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Ge y Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles, CA Young1998 Talent Award, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Board2021 of Governors, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA
Born in 1964 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA PROFESSORSHIPS EDUCATION & FELLOWSHIPS
2017 –ProvostPresentProfessor of Humanities and Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 2016 – 2017 Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 2014 –MontgomeryPresentFellow, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Cecil2014 and Ida Green Honors Chair, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 2007 –Visiting2010Presidential Professor, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 1994 –Associate2003Professor, Pomona College and Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA Doctor2020 Honoris Causa, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA MFA,1994 University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA Skowhegan1994 School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME MS,1988University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA BS,1986Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
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Montgomery2014 Fellow, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Cecil2013 and Ida Green Honors Chair, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX Knight Foundation Grant, Miami, FL
“The Hunt’s Will,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Roadhome,” Galleri Andersson/Sandtröm, Stockholm, Sweden
“Nothing That Is Ours,” Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL “One-on-One:2016 Enrique Martínez Celaya/Albert Pinkham Ryder,” The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. “Small Paintings: 1974-2015,” Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL “Self and Sea,” Parafin, London, United Kingdom
“The Seaman’s Crop,” Parafin, London, United Kingdom
“The Palace,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO
“Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen (Of First and Last Things),” Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany
“SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything,” Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
“Wormwood,” L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA
40 SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
“An Unfinished Conversation: Collecting Enrique Martínez Celaya,” Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL
“The2019 Mariner’s Meadow,” Blain | Southern, London, United Kingdom “13th Havana Biennial,” Detrás del Muro, Havana, Cuba
“The Crossing,” Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York, NY
“The2010 Open,” Simon Lee Gallery, London, United Kingdom
“The Fire of Heaven: Enrique Martínez Celaya and Robinson Jeffers,” Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; traveling to the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA “There-bound,”2021
“The2017 Gypsy Camp,” Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY
2014“Burning as It Were a Lamp,” Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH
“The2013 Tower of Snow,” Strandverket Konsthall, Marstrand, “TheSwedenPearl,” SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM
“Down With Me,” Sara Metzler Gallery, New York, NY
“Self and Land,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO “Empires:2015 Land” and “Empires: Sea,” Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY “Lonestar,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA
“An2009Empty Space,” Akira Ikeda Gallery, New York, NY
“The2022
“A Wasted Journey, A Half-finished Blaze,” Galleri Andersson / Sandström, Umeå, Sweden
Foreigner’s Song,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, NY
“The Cliff,” Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, Australia
“El cielo de invierno,” Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain
“Schneebe2011 ,” Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL
“The Rose Garden” (in collaboration with Unit London), UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA
“A Third of the Night,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA
“Burning as It Were a Lamp,” Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL “The2012 Tower of Snow,” The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
“Un poema a Madrid,” Galería Casado Santapau, Madrid, Spain
“The Tears of Things,” Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “The2018 Other Life,” Galleri Andersson/Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden
“The Mirroring Land,” Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany
“Enrique2001 Martínez Celaya: 1992–2000,” The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI “Enrique Martínez Celaya: 1992-2000,” The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany
“Coming2000 Home,” Griffin, Venice, CA “Paintings of Mercy,” Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Pinturas de merced,” Galería Ramis Barquet, Monterrey, “The1999MexicoField,” Andrew Mummery Gallery at St. Pancras Chambers, London, United Kingdom “Recent1998 Works,” Galerie Bäumler, Regensburg, Germany Luigi Marrozzini Gallery, San Juan, Puerto Rico Griffin, Venice, CA “New Work,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO “Redemption,”1997 Burne Miller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Recent1996 Work,” Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY “Lions1995 of Frosting,” Dorothy Goldman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Black1994 Paintings,” University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA
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“Daybreak,”2008 L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “The Lovely Season,” Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, Australia “Nomad,”2007 Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL “Six Paintings in the Duration of Exile,” Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan “For two Martinson poems, poorly understood,” John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Awaiting a second plan,” Sara Metzler Gallery, New York, NY “Schneebe2006 ,” Museum der bilden Künste Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany “Coming Home,” Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE “Enrique2005 Martínez Celaya: Works on Paper,” Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA “Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Photographs,” Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, IN “Shore: ‘Is today yesterday?’ (Part I),” Akira Ikeda Gallery, Berlin, Germany “Shore: ‘Is today yesterday?’ (Part II),” Griffin Contemporary, Santa Monica, CA “Schneebe2004 ,” Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany “Poetry in Process,” Colorado University Art Museum, Boulder, CO “The October Cycle,” Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL “Recent2003 Paintings,” John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA “The October Cycle,” Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE “Enrique2002 Martínez Celaya: 1992–2000,” Massachuse s College of Art, Boston, MA Griffin, Santa Monica, CA Danese Gallery, New York, NY
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL
Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Arkansas Art Center, Li le Rock, AR
Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Nova Southeastern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC
The Colorado Collection, Boulder, CO
42 SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Sea le, WA
Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, Honolulu, HI
Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech, Germany Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Strandverket Konsthall, Marstrand, Sweden Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA
Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, IN Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO US Bank, Minneapolis, MN
Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Published on the occasion of the exhibition ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA THE FOREIGNER’S SONG 8 September – 15 October 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 Publicationwww.milesmcenery.com0051©2022Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Artwork © Enrique Martínez Celaya Essay © 2022 Leah Ollman Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Joshua White, Los Angeles, CA Color separations by Echelon, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-82-3 Page 2: The Thin Line, (detail), 2022 Page 8 and 9: Enrique Martínez Celaya, Notebooks for The Foreigner’s Song, 2022 Cover: The Eternal Stain, (detail), 2022
