By DeWitt Cheng
In his 1897 tract, “What Is Art?,” Russian novelist and Christian mystic Leo Tolstoy argued that art should convey traditional religious feeling, as in the past, and not rely on ‘poetic’ narrative props to counterfeit emotion or sincerity. The list of such props (“… maidens, warriors, shepherds, hermits, angels, devils in all forms, moonlight, thunderstorms, mountains, the sea, precipices, flowers, long hair, lions, the lamb, the dove, the nightingale …”) made for amusing reading until recently. Irony has seemed to be the prevalent mode of discourse, notwithstanding the Christian artists approved by Tolstoy are all but forgotten today. Culture changes, however, and the shock-and-awe mentality that seemed mandatory for decades has itself diminished. The abstract cosmological paintings of the Swedish visionary Hilma af Klint has lately caused a sensation, almost eighty years after her death — and a full sixty years more after she thought viewers might be ready for her work.
The mythopoetic characters and objects proscribed by Tolstoy’s ukase are back, although depicted in contemporary style. History, psychology and imagination are back, as is Picasso’s metaphor of imaginative, subjective art: “lie[s] that tell the truth.” The polemical half-truths of fad and fashion no longer cut it.
One painter of fanciful symbol, Cuban American Enrique Martínez Celaya, is back with new work after an absence of nearly two decades. The Bay Area was important to the artist’s development and career, so this show is something of a homecoming. It marks a stylistic return as well.
Martínez Celaya is a multimedia artist who has enjoyed a brilliant international career for thirty years, including an astonishing four concurrent shows during 2022 in Los Angeles, where he now resides. He has published nine books of writings on art, philosophy, and poetry. Some of this writing finds its way into his paintings, drawings and installations. Poetic feeling is the goal of his improvisational, experimental work, “committed to life, not just art,” as the artist stated in a recent gallery walk-through of “The Wilderness,” a metaphor for artistic consciousness as well as for a world that demands to be interpreted and creatively ensouled.
Born in 1964, five years after the Cuban Revolution, Martínez Celaya lived in the small beach town of Nueva Paz. When he was eight years old, his anti-Castro family emigrated to Madrid, where the youngster imbibed the Spanish masters at The Prado. Three years later, life under Franco having also proved difficult, the family again relocated, this time to Puerto Rico. Critics like to attribute the recurrent solitary figures in desolate landscapes in his moody paintings to his journeyman years as immigrant and exile.
The artist recounts his family story without drama. Artists, after all, are observers and thinkers, outsiders from mainstream society by temperament and choice. The metaphysical poet Robert Herrick referred to his tribe as “amphibians” navigating two realms. The isolated figure in a landscape is a motif shared by Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, and the Bay Area figurative artists whom the young Martínez Celaya would have known as an art-struck student at Berkeley. He proved to be gifted in mathematics and science as well as art, studying physics at Cornell, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara, working as a laser physicist during and after his graduate studies, commuting between coasts, publishing papers, and even patenting four inventions.
The art instinct, however, proved to be even more insistent and challenging than quantum mechanics and synchrotrons. During a stay at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse hostel in Montara, Martínez Celaya decided that the creative life of the artist, writer, poet, philosopher, and publisher was his true path. Today this contemporary Renaissance man lives and works in a large building outfitted as “a workplace, a monastery, and a laboratory.” He also serves as Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, a post created for him similar to one he had previously held at Dartmouth.
Two portraits — of Leo Tolstoy, his ghost presumably mollified by the nonsectarian religious feeling in Martínez Celaya’s work, and of Käthe Kollwitz, who exemplified for the young physics student the humanistically engaged artist — hang in his studio, along with the motto: Keep Your Actions Faithful.
The current exhibition, entitled “The Wilderness,” comprises nine large and medium-sized paintings on canvas in oil and cold wax, plus a related work on paper, all from the past two years. This aggregation occupies the main Jackson Street gallery space, plus a temporary annex across the street on Hotaling Place.
That single work on paper, done in ink and watercolor, “The rose carrier (or the last of him)” reprises the motif of a naked young man struggling beneath a burden, as does the painting, “The Lesson.” Both suggest the eternal labors of Sisyphus, the tragic hero-rebel of Greek and Existentialist myth, eternally condemned to push a boulder up a mountainside, only for it to roll back down. The young man in these two depictions plods along, his head bent at almost a right angle beneath the weight of a large earthen root ball sprouting branches and shoots, harbingers of future growth. The artist had explored this theme previously in a sculpture entitled “The Gambler,” in which the burden is a pentagonal model house, possibly inspired by Odilon Redon’s 1879 charcoal drawing of the same name, with a giant die as the burden.
Three paintings of single trees framed by narrow vertical bands of architecture or curtains, as if in a religious triptych, reverse the artist’s motif of lone figures in vast wildernesses. That vast panoramic landscape, once threatening or indifferent, is now the constricted, isolated interloper. The sparsely leafed young tree in ”The Prodigal Room” and the more verdant one in “The Homecoming,” could be the same tree seen at different seasons. The titles suggest the story of the prodigal son, who returns home after his misbegotten youth to be forgiven by his father. It is a Biblical metaphor for God’s grace to sinners that was memorably painted by Rembrandt (among many others). The third tree painting, “The Urn” presents a leafless tree — as in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and as in the crucifixion, awaiting redemption for mankind’s sins — framed by a wall and a door. Its inspiration is a photo of Picasso’s last studio. No urn is depicted, but the implication is that the art will serve as the artist’s memorial.
"The Painter (or The Curtain)” depicts an artist holding his palette, posed before a spectral curtain of vertical streaks of paint. A similar artist-hero appears in “The Son,” standing, smudged, palette again in hand, outdoors but sheltered beneath a loggia borrowed from the artist’s memory of his grandparents’ home in Cuba. The airily painted tree foliage adds a nod to Edvard Munch’s striped bedspread in his late self-portrait, “Between the Clock and the Bed.”
In a recent interview Martínez Celaya stated, “I am interested in creating certain experiences, certain scenes, and then undermining them so that the notion of representation — how trustworthy this image is — becomes unstable.” For him, art is tainted by the materialistic spending and acquiring mentality of commercial mass culture. Only art, or rather a return to an artful way of seeing and being, can save us from our lower selves. In order to do this, art must declare its artifice. The paintings of “The Wilderness” do so, with their unpainted vignette-style edges, and as “fragments of poems,” convincing us of their authenticity and sincerity.
