Boy With Horse, 2010
Installed at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York

The boy is a recurrent presence in Martínez Celaya’s work. But he is not a narrative focal point, a character in a story. The boy is to be looked through. He always appears in a structural relationship with the landscape, and in that way embodies human striving and aspiration, hope and struggle in a magnificent,  but resistant world. Perhaps, the boy has also come to embody the particular quality of childhood that experiences the world as radiant, full of wonder, and mystery.

The Featherheart, 2010, 60 x 44 inches
Private Collection, Hong Kong

The image of the boy on crutches balancing a house on his back, which gradually emerges in sketches, watercolors, and paintings, is elaborated further in sculpture, addressing in a more concrete and dramatic manner Martínez Celaya’s concerns with displacement.

The White Memory, 2010; The Gambler, 2011, 69 x 30 x 38.5 inches Private Collection, Chicago

Commissioned by Miami Dade College, The Tower of Snow will be installed in downtown Miami in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Operation Peter Pan, which brought thousands of Cuban children to the United States who were leaving the Castro regime.

The artist working on The Tower of Snow, Miami Studio, 2012

In an interesting painting images fight back and their meanings play hide-and-go-seek with materials as well as with the objecthood of the work of art. (EMC, "On Painting," 2010)

The Meadow, 2009, 66 x 72 inches
Private Collection, London

No painting of Martínez Celaya’s is an execution of a pre-conceived plan. Imagery emerges in the process of painting, not as gestures and marks but as the continuous and gradual refinement of a particular experience. This refinement entails the emergence and elimination of imagery in the process.  Consequently, landscape paintings often bear the emotional residue of figures that have been painted out, while figures that appear in paintings seem to resist—and must continue to resist—the pressure of the landscapes to overwhelm them.

The Sea and the Bear, 2009, 66 x 72 inches,
Private Collection, Miami

Unsatisfied with dissolving certainty, time and consciousness erase distinctions between aspects of reality we consider quite different:  a landscape, a glance, a scent.  With distinctions dissolved and traces and dreams moving around and through what we estimate as real, the world shows itself to be a haze where nothing is certain and nothing completely uncertain, nothing always true or always false, and no thing is definitely separated from another thing. (EMC, “Systems, Time, and Daybreak,” 2008)

Although all of his work is concerned with exploring consciousness and thought, watercolor offers Martínez Celaya a means to explore its mechanics, as if the painted was on mulberry paper represents not thought itself, but its emergence.

Untitled (Boy With Dirt), 2010, 33.35 x 24.5 inches

In some recent paintings, the landscape gradually dissipates through the looseness of the rendering of the paint locating the imagery in an emotional register that resists narration, and, perhaps more importantly, interpretation. 

Daybreak, Installed at LA Louver, Venice, California, 2008

For Martínez Celaya painting is a means to articulate and measure disturbances in thought and feeling the imagery generates. The landscape often creates these disturbances by dislocating the imagery from a narrative, forcing it to operate in the less tangible, less unified—although no less real—realm of memory and imagination. The painted landscape for Martínez Celaya is a battlefield between consciousness and place.

The Boy Raising His Arm, Installed at St. Mary's Cathedral,
Limerick, Ireland

The rich color and robust imagery of some of the paintings is stressed at the edges of the canvas, evoking the impression the imagery of the painting has come together only for a moment, perhaps only as a memory or as an aspiration.

The House, 2006, 116 x 150 inches
Private Collection, East Hampton, New York

Nomad was an environment of five large-scale paintings presented at the Miami Art Museum in 2007.  Through the cyclical recurrence of the seasons, the project interrogates the close relationship between displacement and freedom that is part of the experience of exile. Inspired by the exhibition, the Canadian band, Cowboy Junkies, are at work on an 18-month four-album project called The Nomad Series. (See The Cowboy Junkies website for more information).

Nunca y Siempre, 2007, 116 x 250 inches
Installed at the Miami Art Museum

Invierno (Winter); Primavera (Spring); Verano (Summer); Otoño (Fall), 2007; 116 x 150 inches each

Audio clip from Flirted With You All My Life by Cowboy Junkies

The problem is that painting is not change but rather its opposite.  At best, painting may be an illustration of change, but nothing announces louder what change is not than an illustration of it.  Time, although not a variable in paintings as it is a variable in music, can be an attribute of painting, but only under special conditions. (EMC, "On Painting," 2010)

The Fort, 2007, Oil and wax on canvas, 72 x 66 inches
Private Collection, Berlin

The burnt or burning landscape is a recurring reference in recent painting, which is both a destructive and creative force.  These landscapes bear the evidence of the desolation and, maybe also purification.

The Burning (Mandelstam), 2006, 116 x 150 inches

The Merciful Doctrine, 2009, 24 x 30 inches

Shore I, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2005

The Rail is carved from a Royal Empress tree, whose straight very durable grain suggests this rough sculpture is intended to be as permanent as this sort of thing can be. The roughness of the way it has been carved collides against the expectations raised by the sculpture's representation a seated girl—at least in the initial encounter, the choppy burnt wood and the girl with her hands between her knees seem to belong to different worlds. This form of the girl seated on a rock first appeared on a painting Martínez Celaya created for an exhibition in Berlin in 2005. The most persistent questions that The Rail brings forth are: who is this girl? What or who does she wait for? Whose coat is she wearing? And where is she?

In June of 2008 I cut my hand with a chainsaw while carving the sculpture The Rail.  Two of my assistants almost fainted from the goriness of the situation and the reconstruction required 120 stitches.  The morning after surgery the question came to mind that I have since heard many times from other people: was it worth it?

This question is not easy to answer.

When we ask the worth of a sculpture, we are asking to measure the life-spark animating an otherwise inert piece of wood, and this measurement, even the recognition of that spark, depends on qualities most of us no longer have. (EMC, "On Worth," 2010)

The artist working on The Rail, Santa Monica Studio, 2008

Writers and artists, like the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam whose portrait appears tattooed on the girl's back in the photograph below, are often memorialized and serve as a standard in Martínez Celaya’s work. 

The attentive engagement with a photograph expands awareness beyond the self, and this expanding awareness creates a hollowness, a vacuum, in consciousness which decenters subjectivity and blurs the distinction between inside and outside.  Loss and destruction echo within that cavity created by the hollowing, and grief is their echo… Every photograph says this is what was but also what won’t be again. (EMC, "Photography as Grief," 2007)

The House: Still Whole, 2007, 30 x 36 inches
Private Collection, Chevy Chase, Maryland

Schneebett (Snow Bed) is a two-room environment reflecting on Ludwig van Beethoven’s art and life from the vantage point of the great composer’s deathbed. It was originally created for the Berliner Philharmonic in 2004 and later reinstalled at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig in 2006. Schneebett was recently exhibited at the Miami Art Museum as a promised gift from the German collectors Dieter and Si Rosenkranz.

Schneebett drawing, 2004; Schneebett, 2004, Dimensions variable, Collection of Miami Art Museum

In shifting the attention from the man to the room, I am suggesting Beethoven is, ultimately, a means as well as an end in Schneebett:  a means because through him I wrestle with questions and doubts regarding love, hope, and regret, and an end because the man and his work reveal life as a mystery, and death as fast-approaching. (EMC, "Lecture on Schneebett at Miami Art Museum," 2011)

Video clip from the documentary on Schneebett, 2011

Without the refrigeration the snow-bed would melt.  This life-keeping aspect of hoses and machines is important to the experience of the work, as is the risk of failure:  the glycol/water mixture has to run near the point of complete freezing, and the compressor has to be pushed to near fatigue, for the bed to remain frozen.  The disrupting and monotonous sound of the machines is my crude way to insert the maddening “rushing and roaring sounds” Beethoven heard despite his deafness, into your experience of the work.  The machine sound is an insistent reminder of the absence of music. (EMC, "Lecture on Schneebett at Miami Art Museum," 2011)

Created on the occasion of the exhibition of Schneebett at the Miami Art Museum and influenced by a reconsideration of its concerns, The Master explores the impossibility of impersonating Beethoven and understanding his suffering.  The video explores these concerns through two scenes, the figure, dressed in an 18th-century costume walking the shore and the same figure, undressed, confronting himself in his bathroom mirror.  

Film clip from The Master, 2011, digital video