Hood Museum staff attach a visitor’s poem to a dead apple tree, The Emissary, bringing it back to life.
October, 2024
A visit to the Hood Museum of Art, College in Hanover, New Hampshire, is always an inspirational, intellectually stimulating, and thought provoking experience.
One of the most striking exhibitions currently on display is The Grief of Almost, which features four large-scale paintings and a monumental sculptural installation by the artist Enrique Martinez Celaya. Co-curated by the artist and Jami Powell, associate curator of Native American art, The Grief of Almost is the culmination of a project that was in development over the course of nearly a decade.
Although Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba, raised in Spain and Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles as a professor at the University of Southern California, it is the influences of New England that shine the brightest in this exhibition. Thematically, Martinez Celaya’s work parallels the poetry of Robert Frost, who situated his writing in rural New England settings, often in New Hampshire.
Moreover, the deep personal tragedies Frost experienced including the death of his wife in 1938 and the loss of his son, Carol, to suicide in 1940–are echoed in the contemplative and existential nature of Martínez Celaya’s art, which engages with darkness and hope, decay and renewal, and life and death.
Like Frost, Martinez Celaya pays homage to New Hampshire, where he spent time as a resident artist at Dartmouth College across two stints in 2014 and 2016-2017. During his time in the Granite State, Martínez Celaya was inspired by views of the Connecticut River, the pine forests, and the mountains. The paintings in the exhibition represent the New England landscape in familiar ways, depicting fiery foliage, rocky terrain, and the serene-yet-rugged natural environment.
Martínez Celaya’s work is characterized by rich symbolism and emotional depth. His artwork possesses a profound tension between dueling forces, paralleling Robert Frost’s celebrated poem “Fire and Ice." Just as Frost contrasts fire and ice–both literally and metaphorically–Martinez Celaya contrasts bleak imagery of environmental decav with moments of beauty.
The Grief of Almost centers on the tension between decay and loss versus beauty and re-birth, creating a profound sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. The absence of a clear narrative in the scenes intensifies this confusion-an intentional effect. By forgoing explanatory wall labels, the artist invites audiences to draw from their own experiences and emotions, encouraging them to navigate the disorientation through personal interpretation and feeling.
These tensions are embodied in all the pieces on view. The Apple Tree (2023) depicts a tree that has shed its leaves, softly illuminated by an amber glow. This warm light casts a haunting-yet- beautiful aura. The ember flicks and specks scattered throughout generate a sense of mysticism. In the foreground, a girl with bizarre facial features holds a basket of flowers, adding an element of the uncanny to the painting. Withering lilies emphasize the theme of decay. This writer was particularly drawn to the poppy; its black center, outlined in bright white, evoked a personal memory of witnessing the moment of totality during the solar eclipse that graced northern New England in the fall of 2023–a moment that felt deeply spiritual.
The painting’s sense of instability is further heightened by the black, gray, and sulfur yellow paint dripping down the canvas, as if the picture was disintegrating.
Similarly, paint drippings in whites, greens, blues, and yellows-evocative of acid rain-threaten to dissolve the large apple tree at the center of The Harvest (2023). In full bloom, the tree emerges from a landscape reminiscent of the moon’s surface, or perhaps just the rocky terrain of a New England mountain. The painting creates a tension between the barren ground and the fertility of the apple tree-per-haps a testament to nature’s ability to adapt in even the most dire circumstances-- as well as between darkness and light. It captures an ambiguous moment in time: a break in the clouds allows light tto stream through, forming a rainbow against a clear, starry night sky.
The Awakened (2023) depicts a silhouette of an anonymous human figure in freefall through the fiery foliage characteristic of New England’s autumn season. The contrast between the vibrant leaves and the shadowy figure falling into the void evokes feelings of depression and despair, underscoring the painting’s existential themes. The Other Life (2023) features a skeletal tree set against a bright orange horizon, reminiscent of a sunset. Specks of yellow leaves emerging from the branches signal the beginning of a new cycle, indicating hope and renewal following a period of desolation.
This budding tree finds a physical counterpart in The Emissary (2024), a sculptural installation featuring a plane dragging a dead, uprooted apple tree. Suspended precariously from the gallery ceiling, the plane-painted to resemble the night sky-appears on the verge of crashing into the floor.
The scene exudes an eerie stillness, like a final moment frozen in time before the plane hurtles to the ground. The apple tree, a recurring symbol in Martínez Celaya’s work, carries deep cultural and historical significance. In religious art, it often represents the Biblical tree of knowledge, associated with the introduction of greater awareness, but also sin and corruption into the world. This tension and duality are also reflected in the installation, encapsulating the exhibition’s themes. As part of the work, visitors are invited to write reflective notes about the show on small pieces of scrap paper and place them in a collection box. These notes are then hung on the branches, resembling leaves and metaphorically reviving the tree. This collective act of participation represents the process of renewal and illustrates how, when we come together, we can overcome even the most destructive adversities.
A deeply existential exhibition, The Grief of Almost challenges visitors tto confront the complexities of human experience and our relationship with the natural world. While the show’s bleak outlook evoked within this writer a profound sense of pessimism and fatalism, suggesting the inevitability of the world’s ending, it also revealed a haunting beauty amidst the desolation. Martínez Celaya’s artworks remind us that beauty persists even in the most ruinous settings.
