Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Mariner’s Meadow

Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Mariner’s Meadow, 23 May – 13 July 2019, Blain|Southern London

The capacity of painting to create and sustain meaning is one of Enrique Martínez Celaya’s central concerns. This may be because Martínez Celaya is both an artist and also, formerly, a scientist.

As such he may well acknowledge Julius Colwyn’s recent assertion that art and science are ‘human efforts to comprehend and describe the world around us and our experience of it’. The one ‘searches for truth in subjective experience and the other in objective reality.’ Colwyn concludes that it is in the rift ‘between subjective experience and the objective reality where ‘art’ manifests.’[i]

Daniel Siedell has explored the reasons Martínez Celaya has given for ‘leaving his job as a top researcher at Coherent Medical and to begin selling his paintings in local parks’.[ii] What led him to this decision was the recognition ‘that my preoccupations, which revolved around messy and youthful questions of living, suffering, and the choices we make, would ultimately be better addressed in art.’ In other words, Siedell notes, Martínez Celaya came to believe that art, rather than science, could better serve ‘the larger purposes of understanding, self-awareness, and acceptance’. ‘It is in art’, he has said, ‘and not in religion or science, that I look for truth.’

Siedell suggests that for Martínez Celaya ‘each work is an effort to discern a stability and clarity that lies below the murkiness of experience—an order, or a structure, that he calls truth.’ Yet the order he seeks is ‘a whisper of the order of things that dismantles consciousness and suggests my place in the world.’ [iii]

As a result, ‘The impact of all paintings,’ Martínez Celaya writes, ‘exists in their uncomfortable relationship to the world.’[iv] The images in ‘The Mariner’s Meadow’ exist in an uncomfortable relationship with the sea; which is, at one and the same time, the fertile acreage in which the Mariner plies his trade and also relentless in its ability to surround and swamp all in its path.

Siedell notes a dialectical friction in Martínez Celaya’s work between the domestic and the epic, ‘the personal concerns of life played out against the backdrop of the impersonal universals of nature and time’. The stark, foreboding seascape of ‘The Generations’ Keeper’ is headed by the phrase ‘laugh at the ideals’. The darkest piece of the exhibition ‘The Returning Tale’ depicts a home circumscribed by the returning tide. The sea teaches us about our anonymity. It is ‘the end of all paths and the edge of all comings and goings.’ Our insignificance revealed in the face of nature's scale and relentless repetitions.

This dialectic of content is set within a further dialectic, that of presence and reference; ‘the presence of the painting as an artefact in the world—pigment smeared on a canvas—and its reference—the imagery or subject matter that invites memory and associations.’ The unpainted edges of his canvases indicate the limitations of painting and the existence of something beyond the image, even the image as ‘flashes from somewhere else, collective memories from a mysterious origin.’

‘The Prophet’ is an image which has undergone significant change in the making as Martínez Celaya sought a revelatory image. The edges of this painting are where traces of the earlier images are left, like lipstick on a collar. The final image sees a young girl posing with a dead shark recently washed up on the beach, one foot placed in awkward dominance on the stricken creature. ‘The Prophet’ reveals the unease of our unnatural attempts to dominate nature. ‘The Herald’ takes us deeper into our despoiling of nature by depicting an oil spill aflame; the title perhaps referencing a different maritime disaster, but one – The Herald of Free Enterprise - which named the imperative driving our dominating, despoiling actions.

By contrast with these images of our unthinking yet uneasy attempts to dominate the enduring chill of the ocean and its depths, in ‘The Name’ the sea is backdrop to the endurance of a carved wood statue depicting a prayerful angel and another depicting flowers. Here, the images endure as the sea endures; art and belief mirroring the unchanging nature of nature.

The sea is sometimes a mirror, at other times a window, and occasionally a letter, while the birds that fly in these canvases sing songs that are messages from our forgotten places. As a whisper of the order of things that dismantle consciousness and suggest our place in the world, art manifests itself in the equivalent of the sea’s swells, the space between subjective and objective reality. These images see Martínez Celaya participating in our human effort to comprehend and describe the world around us and our experience of it. As in his life decisions, he values the subjective truth of those glimpses into identity and meaning that art provides above and alongside the exacting measurement of the material that science delivers.

[i] https://issuu.com/artsciencecsm/docs/maas_class_2019_catalogue_clean_pdf
[ii] ‘On Martinez Celaya’ by Daniel A. Siedell in On Art and Mindfulness, published in 2015 in collaboration with Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
[iii] Quoted in “The Prophet” (2009), in Enrique Martínez Celaya, Collected Writings & Interviews 1990-2010 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), p. 231-32.
[iv] Enrique Martínez Celaya, “On Painting” (2010), in Collected Writings & Interviews, p. 243.

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Corinne Bailey Rae - The Sea.

Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (4)

The latest Image Update features Daniel Siedell, among others:

"Daniel Siedell is a cultural ambassador for a new age. His 2008 book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art offered a suspension bridge over the old culture war-era chasm between Christians and the art world, inviting Christians to release the old understanding that contemporary culture is godless and destined for self-destruction, and suggesting instead that we can listen and learn from much new art. In an Image web interview, he said: “It is a cliché, but I would suggest that one must approach contemporary art with an open mind. There is an ethical component here. Attending to those details, looking closely, is a useful discipline for us as Christians, who are supposed to see Christ everywhere, especially in the faces of all people. If we dismiss artwork that is strange, unfamiliar, unconventional, if we are inattentive to visual details, how can we be attentive to those around us?” More than a critic, Siedell also participates in the making of art, and in making art accessible: for over ten years he has worked collaboratively with painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, whom he profiled for the current issue of Image. Siedell has recently set aside an academic career in order to head up Martinez Celaya’s Florida studio, Whale and Star, where he’ll work on a number of interdisciplinary projects involving books, lectures, music, artist workshops, and more."

Siedell writes: "Although he is not personally religious, Martínez Celaya has written in his sketchbook that “Art is either religion or it is nothing at all” and often quotes Wittgenstein’s observation that although he was not a religious man, he could not help but look at the world from a religious point of view. He takes the ethical dimension of artistic practice seriously. For Martínez Celaya to speak of art as religion is not an excuse for art to illustrate or promote religious faith or to indulge in self-referential talk of the spiritual, which, like Stepan Arkadyevitch’s newspaper and cigar in Anna Karenina, provides the pleasurable sensation of a slight fog in his brain. Rather, to push art toward religion is to move it away from the confines of white-walled galleries, their air thick with theory, where art is autonomous from the rest of life—and toward the bracing atmosphere and harsh light of the real world. It is the structural framework of religion, as a comprehensive worldview, that shapes Martínez Celaya’s understanding of artistic practice. Religion functions as a standard, a test. “I want painting to function in my life the way most people want religion to function in theirs,” he writes. When curator Klaus Ottmann placed The Boy Raising His Arm in Saint Mary’s Church in Limerick, Ireland, at the biennial A Sense of Place for OPEN ev+a 2007, Martínez Celaya regarded it as “a circumstance capable of generating new insights...[that] would recreate the work of art”."

Find out more about Siedell here or read his essay on the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya in Image issue 70. My review of God in the Gallery can be found by clicking here.

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Peter Case - Colours of Night.

The DNA of the western imagination

Daniel A. Siedell's latest post gives clues as to some of the directions Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and I are planning to go in with the Living the Story course we are currently planning. Siedell's post is based on a biblical reading of the work of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya:

"First, it argues that the Bible's influence does not have to be embodied in a self-conscious way, as a form of meditation or reflection on particular biblical themes. If the Bible is the DNA of the western imagination, as such critics as George Steiner, Northrop Frye, and Andrew Delbanco suggest,then it should be present in some way in the work of an artist such Martínez Celaya, who is deeply formed by the western literary tradition, not only as a reader but as a writer of poetry and prose ... Second, the exhibition argues that the Bible can function as a provocative and enriching critical tool, which can expand rather than limit the experience of art ...

The Bible is a rich resource for critical practice. But for use in this context, it needs to be liberated from the believers, who fear that its authority or infallability as God's word is undermined if it approached as literature. For them, art, literature, music, film, and theatre should function as Bible studies and devotional exercise in paint, sound, word, and image. Far from protecting it, this literalistic approach to "Biblical art" weakens its power, restricting its use to quoting chapter and verse in support of dogma and theology. This makes the Bible boring and obscures the fact that it is a dynamic and powerful cultural artifact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...

to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the  creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Recent books by scholars Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity) and Bruce Hoslinger (The Premodern Condition) have revealed this more clearly. The paucity and shallowness of contemporary art criticism, which oscillates between journalism, marketing, and obscure pseudo-theory, might be ameliorated through a rediscovery of the literary treasures of the Bible, treasures that have seduced the greatest minds and artists throughout modernity (and postmodernity)."

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Willard Grant Conspiracy - Fare Thee Well.