Enrique Martínez Celaya. Empires: Land, 2015; installation view, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Empires primarily includes paintings, many monumental in scale, along with a handful of sculptures and works on paper. Some paintings tenderly build shifting surfaces, and others only thinly delineate tentative forms and spaces. A persistent horizon line runs through nearly every image. Celaya’s slim companion volume spans the three months preceding his show; the text originally appeared in the “Journal” section of his website. Though not a key, the text may be a hinge, opening a door toward a mode of reading time through Celaya’s recent body of work. Fittingly, the best of these works leave the door ajar.

“What it seems to be undermines itself,” Celaya begins as we circle the gallery. He is quick to redirect readings of his work that rely on metaphor and allegory. It’s perhaps no surprise; the abundance of boats, sand castles, children, and the occasional unicorn put a simplistic reading within arm’s reach. Familiar with rigid interpretations of these images, Celaya is thoughtful about the conversation he crafts around his work. He places skepticism of the image at the heart of his practice, pointing to the drips and scratches that mar the canvas’s surface as evidence of this acute awareness. “I would never describe my work as figurative work,” he says. It might be more accurate to say that Celaya’s interest in rendering the figure points to the act of rendering, an operation we perform daily as we assemble chaotic experiences into history, memory, and identity. “The images are a point of entry,” he says, “which I hope then disappear.”

Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Bloom, for the Wilderness, 2015; oil and wax on canvas; 74-3/4 x 101-3/4 x 2-1/2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Indeed, my initial impression of Empires is as a series of false entries. Composed centrally, the images offer breaking cloud covers and exposed shorelines. But what appears to invite just as quickly turns strange. In the case of The Bloom, for the Wilderness, the image of a crashing wave recalls the experience of being temporarily blinded after walking from darkness into a brightly lit room. In this sense, figuration highlights a disjuncture. Celaya’s work seems at times so near that it evades recognition.

It’s in Celaya’s non-key that I find this notion most compelling. The text is divided into twelve entries, each dated. It moves between his direct address of the show (“Seeing the paintings and sculptures and models as small images makes me think about remnants”) to fragments of narrative, personal observation, dreams, and excerpts from poetry and song lyrics.[2] Stories, when they appear, are thin, not in that they are poorly made but because their facture is visible. They are among the types of stories that assemble the trajectory of human life: ambition, failure, aspiration, regret. They are told. They are those stories that conspire to form Celaya’s notion of empire, a “sense of self projected into the future.”[3]

Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Measure, 2015;
 oil and wax on canvas;
 78 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Like his text, Celaya’s most effective paintings point to the friction involved in the making of personal meaning. In The Measure, Celaya conjures a young boy in a boat without sail, tumbled on a dark sea. Like many of Celaya’s works, this one hints at multiple horizons, balanced precariously above eye level. Boat and boy are rendered in the same deep stuff; they are pressed together like slatted wood. And like its subject, the painting appears to be in motion. Celaya’s works halt just before the canvas’s edge, as if inviting us to peel back the image, like a page. It might be an epic, if it wasn’t so funny; that is, these works are self-aware without being ironic. They acknowledge that the act of creating images, like any form of making meaning, is both absurd and absolutely necessary.

Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Deeper Life, 2015;
 bronze; 4 x 26 x 46 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.

The strangeness of Celaya’s paintings is brought to light by his treatment of the text, one that unravels narrative even as it is pieced together. But ultimately, Celaya’s objects—most cast in bronze or assembled from found objects—appear to me too resolved to capture this same tip-of-the-tongue quality. Mounted on a mirrored pedestal, The Deeper Life is a bronze cast of an oversized skate, which is tenderly painted with stars to resemble a night sky. As a beautifully crafted object, this works lays confident claim to space. Whereas the paintings offer points of entry, Celaya’s objects are closed circuits.

Empires: Land and Empires: Sea are on view at Jack Shainman Gallery through October 24, 2015.

[1] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from the artist are from an interview at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, September 12, 2015.

[2] Enrique Martínez Celaya, Empires: The Writing (New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2015).

[3] Enrique Martínez Celaya, in conversation with Robin Cembalest, September 10, 2015, Jack Shainman Gallery, http://www.jackshainman.com/artists/martinez-celaya/#video.

Installation View

“I didn’t set out to be a 48-year old man painting unicorns,” remarks Cuban-born painter and sculptor, Enrique Martínez Celaya. Featured in six of the sixteen works currently on view at L.A. Louver, the one-horned mythical creature does make an unlikely appearance in Celaya’s work; though it is merely one facet of his calculated exploration of absurdity rooted in reality. The Hunt’s Will is a continuation of the artist’s purposefully divergent narrative: vibrant and whimsical, but also muted and unidealized – a conscientious union that encapsulates Celaya’s preoccupation with disillusionment. In totality, his work appears the uncanny amalgamation between the pragmatic and imaginative – perhaps a residual effect of his Ph.D in Quantum Electronics – yet it maintains the vague familiarity of recollection. Scrutinizing “the promises of childhood,” Celaya extracts vignettes from the ubiquitous farce in which the unknowable meets reality.

The Guest, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 92 x 118 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

In The Guest, Celaya exemplifies the isolation that often comes with knowledge. The young bullfighter stands atop a tree stump, and stares pleadingly at the viewer. A charcoal mountain range looms in the background, void of amphitheater or four-legged opponent, and starkly rendered with Celaya’s wax and oils. Wistful in his expression, the matador seems prematurely defeated; his red muleta dangling limply by his side. As if plucked from the drama of his playful daydream and stranded in this melancholic locale, the bullfighter personifies the cognizance of mortality. Not only do the reveries of our youth rarely become manifest, but the exclusive guarantee in life is death – for we are simply guests upon this earth.

The One Who Has Taken Its Place, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 78 x 100 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

It is this arrival upon enlightenment that Celaya captures so succinctly, even in its most unassuming incarnations. In “The One Who Has Taken Its Place,” an ivory unicorn tussles with a German Shepard; a picturesque blue sky and grassy meadow setting a seemingly frolicsome scene. However, the ambiguity of this interaction denotes unease, as the encounter is neither determinately benign nor violent. As the adult mind grasps the limitations of a terrestrial actuality, is the fantastic image ultimately annihilated by one of domesticity, or is their coexistence feasible? Such an unreliable milieu accentuates the necessity of choice – both with regard to the immediate viewer, and the external factors that shape our perpetual maturation.

The Faithful, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 132 x 180 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Celaya’s paradigm for disenchantment is simultaneously one of faith. Despite the distress oftentimes innate to awareness, there is also the opportunity for decidedly resolved belief and hope – regardless of futility. “The Faithful” features a solitary black bird seeking refuge in a snow-laden thicket as a sherbet-hued dusk unfolds. As if awaiting a greater purpose, the bird is apparently unfazed by its thorny circumstances – perhaps an homage to the deficiencies of cynicism and rationality. Though Celaya’s figures often suffer a kind of instability, they typify the conditions he cites as universally endured: “a life under threat of forgetfulness, and the collision between what one hopes and what happens.”

The Long Dream, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 78 x 96 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Through he refutes any loyalty to Magical Realism, Celaya seamlessly obscures the boundaries between verisimilitude, fiction, memory, and subconscious – a sublime tapestry woven from the threads of experience and invention. “The Long Dream” illustrates this fluidity of being, as a barely perceptible unicorn forges through an open sea. The inky sky and waves meet without horizon as the creature treads towards an unascertainable future, alluding to the improvised movements through which we make our way. It is at once a portrait of ephemerality and forbearance; a duality that Celaya masterfully portrays in his excavation of the dark, otherworldly waters we compulsively tread.

“The Hunt’s Will” is on view at L.A. Louver through January 5, 2013.