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Click to enlarge any image below:
The Light (as in a dream), 2007
Oil, tar and wax on canvas
72 x 66 inches
$60,000
2006 Exhibition
 
BOY and GIRL, 2005
Hand colored lithograph, 60 x 37 inches, Ed/23
$10,000. for the pair
"The Atlantic seems different than I remember. It is probably that for eighteen years I had been near the Pacific, my eyes used to hills diving into the grayish waters of the California Coast. There is no soil in Florida. Only sand. No oaks. Only pine trees and palms. At night, the salty smell coming from the sea is not a Northern smell, like the Pacific's, but a complex Southern mixture of death and melancholia that some around here call excitement.
Some time ago, I was riding my bicycle on a road along this same Atlantic Ocean. The sun on the water seemed permanent. My breathing was steady. My heart stable. Around a bend, the leaves of a camphor tree rustled in the sea breeze. While my eyes followed the flicker, the apparent permanence of all things faded leaving only the present. I will miss that yellowgreen tree, I thought.
Last year, during a bath, my three-year old daughter asked me, "Daddy, is today yesterday?" I looked at her small body amid the expanse of porcelain. Fragile. Vibrant. I forget what I said. But I was thinking that tomorrow she would discover her bathkingdom was small.
Her question and that camphor tree precipitated the actions and thoughts that have influenced the work of the past year.
In the group of works for the Greg Kucera Gallery, my focus has been on the relationship of the figure and the landscape. In particular, their interconnectedness and what the landscape imposes upon consciousness. The figures are young men and boys, but I also see them as girls and adults - individuals in some struggle with the integrity of their Being or in some indeterminate state of Becoming - sometimes echoed in the landscape and sometimes undermined by the landscape.
The materials of this body of work are tar, blood, watercolor, oil and bronze. I use these materials because they are charged but also problematic, full of history. Meaningful. Helping me to be invested and interested. The works on paper are mounted on linen and panel to bring to the forefront of the interaction between the public and the artwork the work's surface. Unmediated by the glass." - Enrique Martinez Celaya
THE MUSIC (AGE), 2002
Color soapground aquatint etching
46 x 36.5 inches, Ed/25
$2,500.
THE MUSIC (TANGIBLE), 2002
Color soapground aquatint etching
46 x 36.5 inches, Ed/25
$2,500.
click to enlarge any image
FIGURE WITH BIRCH (LARKS), 2002
Color aquatint etching with drypoint
22 x 25 inches, Ed/15
$2,500.
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Enrique Martinez Celaya was born in Palos, Cuba on June 9, 1964. He began his art training as apprentice to an academic painter at the age of eleven. In addition to painting, he published poetry, built a laser, and received prizes from the Department of Energy and the National Congress of Science. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Physics from Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley and before finishing his M.F.A. with honors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he received recognition and patents for his work at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Electronics Research Laboratory in Berkeley. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine with a fellowship and was a tenured professor at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University until his resignation in 2003. In 1998 Martinez Celaya received Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art Here and Now Award, in 2001 the Hirsch Grant, in 2002 the Rosa Blanca Award from the Cuban Community and in 2004 the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund Award.
Martinez Celaya has published and edited several books and essays of fiction, poetry, science and philosophy. His body of work has elicited comparisons outside the visual arts to the writings of Paul Celan and Jos? Saramago and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since his first show in 1995, his paintings, photographs and sculptures have been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and others. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Delray Beach, Florida.
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