Enrique Martínez Celaya: For Kant the idea of transcendence and belief can only lead to confusions and are to be avoided. Hegel tries to reconcile the limit Kant places on rational ideas with what he calls "Spirit". I am interested in Hegel’s ideas of reconciliation of opposites, the dialectic, which influences my disbelief in partial truths.

MAG: What do you mean precisely by disbelief in partial truths?

EMC: I enjoy Hegel’s ambition, even if problematic, to write the philosophy of the whole. Especially that part of Hegel's where the move towards absolute knowledge is grounded in a possible communion with a higher entity. I find it interesting, in Hegel's case, that there is a mixture of rigorous analyses and critical engagement, while holding this very fuzzy concept of belief.

MAG: Let me see if I understand you. Are you telling me you’re using Hegel because he articulates a practice, a philosophical practice, that enables one to accept the metaphysical?

EMC: Right.

MAG: Curious. Let me ask the question another way, if Hegel gives you a method or entertaining metaphysical thought, what does painting, as a physical operation enable you to do in that vein? I mean here we have to enter the paradoxical ground of searching for the metaphysical through the physical. Is it the paradox you’re after or is it the representation of a metaphysical realm that you strive for?

EMC: I am not interested in any representation or illustration of the metaphysical. It is the epiphany that I am after, not imagining what it will be like. I like the physicality of these objects, but always as a vehicle. The physical aspect of these works and what they evoke generates a third state. This third state or quality is the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual as intellectual clarity. This is the solution to the paradox that you mentioned.
However, let me clarify something. I do not like the word "spiritual" because it conveys too many meanings which do not interest me. By spiritual I mean, of the spirit, of that which is beyond appearances and which completes the feeling of the appearances. I am not saying that my painting can mediate these profound levels, but in a great work of art, one can be in a realm where rational knowledge and spirit can coexist.

MAG: Are you saying the viewer can?

EMC: Yes, the viewer can.

MAG: And in the midst of painting can the painter?

EMC: Yes, the painter can exist in this realm. However, the act of painting is often delusional and the painter must edit within his or her rapture. The elation or euphoria that often happens while working does not guarantee a higher plane of experience. It will be nice if it did.

MAG: So do you see yourself commenting on the problem raised by other painters regarding what has been called “the mystical,” or do you see yourself embarking on another path of inquiry?

EMC: I see myself embarking on a different path. In many ways it draws on the experiences you refer to but I try to reconcile views that belonged in the past to different camps. I think that many of the traditional dichotomies about the nature of painting, and art in general, stem from the Judeo-Christian polemic between mind and body. It is their synthesis that seems more applicable in understanding experience.
I believe that the dichotomies between the emotional and the intellectual or the physical and the spiritual have been made confusing by polarizing them. It is analogous to what happened in Physics when people fought over the nature of light. In trying to decide whether light was a particle or a wave, Physics was confused for about two hundred years. It was saved from these limiting views by the reconciliation offered by Quantum Mechanics. This can be applied to art and thought where constant oppositions are set up without any intrinsic reason to do so.

MAG: Meaning that the bifurcation between physicality and metaphysically is a false?

EMC: Well, they are certainly less separated one will assume by hearing the debating sides. Their contradiction emerges in superficial thinking but seems to vanish in more profound analyses. In my own experience I find that things are more real as they oscillate between the physical and the metaphysical. To the point that what I call "real" is a testimony of the experience of this oscillation. If something remains either permanently physical or metaphysical it ceases to be real, or to be a thing fully accounted for.

MAG: Now with respect to your new paintings, you chose the human head, rather than say, the trunk or the feet, as a primary sign. Does the head become the sign of this reconciliation of the paradox, meaning, a body part that could most likely bring people to the recognition of this realm you’re describing?

EMC: I think that there is an immediate recognition of a head as a consciousness without raising the theatrical problems of the full figure. A figure seems to transform the painting into a sort of stage. The head is also is the strongest association with the memory of someone, and sometimes with memory itself. I am interested in the first read of these paintings, their evocative quality rather than their symbolism like the head being understood as the bed of thought or any of these historical views of the head or the other parts of the body. It is like trying to get at the feeling of thinking of the head of my mother, for example. I am interested in a direct signifier to the person without the trapping of illustration.

MAG: That makes a lot of sense when one thinks about the head as that aspect of the figure that embodies parts that are, if you will, relational, parts that enable us to connect to other people – kissing lips, gazing eyes, ears that perk up upon hearing that special voice. The head, as I am thinking about it in your aesthetic vernacular is not only a sign of making memory but a symbol of desiring communion, a trope of the subject who wants love – love in the sense of intimately communicating with that which is “out there” and beyond. In other words, the head, rather than say a toe or a knee, is that normative sign of subjectivity and psychological relations. Am I getting too abstract here?

EMC: No, it makes sense. The difficulty of this conversation is in part due to the terms we are using. We are talking about ideas that are I call “soft” because they are imprecise and difficult to define. People have seen this lack of precision as a symptom of the lack of validity of ideas like the ones we are discussing and most critical theories have consequently avoided them. I think this is a mistake.
These heads and the feelings they present, are my way to make images that insist or oppose that which the paintings establish. Sometimes they are intuitive produced and sometimes they are not, but they are always precipitated by the act of painting. Sometimes they hold together opposites, like violence and serenity, that seem to reconcile in the physical work. The compression of these opposites brings together different levels of awareness, and these in turn take physical form.
In this group of works, the visual works and the poems, heads have been prevalent. But I also use birds, arms, legs and hands. I think that these images are not fixed, although it responds to my present needs. In my paintings there is a constant battle between decisions that predetermine the visual and spontaneity. My paintings are central, iconic, physical and referential. This really limits the kind of images that can exist in the works which would be capable of maintaining a conceptual equilibrium in the work. I find insight in this rigidity. So my role is to search through the predetermined ideas to find the ones that are truly evocative.

MAG: What are some of the ideas that you have left out of paintings, ones that aren’t as evocative to give us a sense of what is evocative. For instance, we have heads, we have birds and bodies that are fragmented. We don’t have “airplanes or cars”-

EMC: I have used airplanes before but I am not interested in technology or culture as an inventory of experience. As technology changes people’s engagement with a work will change, it becomes obsolete by relying on the ever changing surface of interest. I come from a background in science. I think that most physics labs have much more engaging technology than any art gallery. The art gallery technology get its novelty because it is accessible, you are allowed to see it and maybe you have never seen little motors moving. But it never compares to a nuclear accelerator.
This is true of culture as well. I am only concerned with culture as an external signifier pointing to internal universes. As a foreigner, I have seen the interest of cultural elements change from one country to the next. I, however, in the ways that are most mysterious, remain fundamentally the same. People around me also seem the same. The veneer of culture, which provides many answers to contemporary thinkers, seems to me to have little relevance in the questions that matter. I am interested in culture only as it relates to the specific feeling of an specific individual, and often how it is empathized through me.

MAG: Right, because the last time we spoke you said you were interested in the poetics of experience.

EMC: Right. But not in the way that a musical play is interested in the musicality of experience. I do not want to sing the poetics of experience. Instead, I am moved by the poignant poetry that is present in experience.

MAG: Consequently, you’re not interested in critiquing experience per se. Rather you are determined to use poetics that would suggest a play with meaning, specifically meaning that is let us say, subtextual or inferred. Somehow in listening to you speak now it almost sounds as though culture in the poetic sense is to be understood as that cannot be reduced to mere logical explanation or analysis.

EMC: Right. For example, in discussions about the dichotomy between culture and self, and the related dilemma of which one is the creator of the other one, little progress has been made. I do not necessarily find these debates uninteresting but I do not think that I will find my answers there. I am interested in that which is felt, by which I do not mean sentimentality or some sort of melodramatic display. I mean emotion inseparable from thought, deep emotional empathy. I do not know the way to speak of a distinction between thought and emotion that is fundamental and not merely circumstantial. The best thinkers and writers always display a poignant emotion and a sensitive intelligence. In them, the dichotomy outlined in many critical debates is not present.
This concentrated emotion or spirit, is most interesting to me. Its mysteriousness is surprisingly clarifying although not in the polarizable form of partial ideas. It is a synthesis where one oscillates from belief to disbelief, the oscillation is the force and the secret.

MAG: In summary then, would you say you are grappling with an area of human understanding that has been forgotten or doesn’t fit with what either an old-fashioned positivist notion of rational analysis or the more current post-structuralist idea of criticality?

EMC: Yes. I think that what is underlying here is the idea of a “complete thought." This compared to making distinctions between rational and emotional thoughts. While they are different circumstances of the mind, these partial understandings lead to apparent discontinuities. In these discontinuities consciousness seems to have a glitch, or time seems to fracture.
Just like in mathematics, these discontinuities can be understood by taking a more global, a more encompassing view. This, if you think about it, is the opposite of the conventional approach to analyzing discontinuities. Intellectual, emotional or experiential discontinuities are often studied in gross detail by most contemporary thinkers. This may be pleasurable but is not productive. There is nothing to understand in a discontinuity.

MAG: Let’s think about this in terms of a specific painting of yours; for instance, the one you have in the dining room that contains a fragment of a hand in a beak of a bird. Now I understand fragmentation but I would have to ask myself what do you really mean by discontinuous because there is an image before me in the present and it’s not discontinuous with my experience, that is, if discontinuous means “doesn’t follow with.” What are we talking about?

EMC: I am glad that you are asking that. First, what I mean by discontinuity is not at all in the language. Second, The Fragility of Nearness,1998 is an iconic painting following in the 14th century tradition of having a central motive with almost no doubt as to what is important. It may seem very continuous upon a first read, nothing too layered. Concentration should quickly destroy its concreteness, its continuity. Someone might think of discontinuity as the work of Lari Pittman, for example, where repeated visual takes layer fractionary aspects onto one another. This is an extremely continuous illustration of the confusing layers of experience. It is like when a time travel movie shows you two distinct centuries and you say “wow, this is crazy.” But on your couch you have not managed to dislocate your time and experience. The illustration did not generate the experience but it was entertaining.
I am pursuing the exact opposite position. I am after a work so nothing and so dense that in engaging it, the act of becoming is generated. A moment when two colliding aspects of mind seem to throw light in all directions, and the viewer is simultaneously validated and destroyed in its presence. This for me is clarity broken with time itself.

MAG: Ordinary time?

EMC: Ordinary time. For example, when you go to your parents yard and you see the gardenias that your mother liked. In the moment that you smell them memory does a strange thing. In that moment maybe the trip to the yard is fractured in time. Layered in two times at once but felt simultaneously, compacted. How would you describe that experience? I am not interested in describing it. I am interested in going through that experience to the state where those two moments can coexist at once.

MAG: Let me back up a bit and return to the issue you raise about expanding the field of inquiry to allow for discontinuity. You claim your paintings are iconic: heads float in large space. That simple point of particularity in empty space. Is that a visual metaphor for what you’re describing as scoping out the larger picture? Or maybe you’re not talking about a one to one relation between the paintings and your ideas.

EMC: There is not a one to one correlation between the space of the paintings and actual space. Paintings need different strategies to extract truth from experience than those that the physical universe presents. Paintings are products of the mind in physical form. Their rules and their powers are based on components of the mind, without a one to one translation beyond itself. This is why illustrations always fail, they impose the logic of the things as they seem to objects of the mind.
My paintings are simple. There is not much going on but their are not about reductivism. If you engage them, maybe, something may be clear or mysterious, or both. Loss and gain, emotion and though, longing and acceptance compress themselves by means of a good work. My works value this level of engagement, but whether or not it is reached by then it is hard for me to say in any absolute way.
Even by saying this now and presenting these opposites I mislead the discussion. These concepts do not apply as fundamental but only as functional distinctions. If you speak about these fragments of the whole you mislead. The whole can not be fragmented if one is to be rigorous about it. All the fragments are partial views, with their associated obscurities, of the larger question. The larger question is consciousness and that is why I started with Hegel.