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Martinez Celaya has placed around the studio images of the people important to him: a photograph of his mother, Edilia, when she was a young woman, photos of his four children, and high up on a wall, a portrait of an aging, bearded, ascetic Leo Tolstoy, who sits with hands clasped, eyes boring into the camera.
Tolstoy’s gaze seems an implacable rejection of the camera’s scrutiny, but as you look more closely another expression emerges: somber and searching, with a hint of sorrow.
That grave ceaseless spirit of inquiry and idealism also seems to have animated Martinez Celaya throughout his life.
He began painting and drawing as a child, but studied applied physics and electrical engineering as an undergraduate at Cornell University, before earning an M.S. in quantum electronics at Berkeley.
In 1990, Martinez Celaya, who lives in Los Angeles, decided to leave the field of science and made a 180-degree turn toward the life of an artist, earning an M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994. On Monday, Martinez Celaya will give a talk on the role of the artist in the world at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter Hall at Dartmouth.
Martinez Celaya may have left the sciences, but that doesn’t mean that the scientist’s methods and habits have left Martinez Celaya.
When people think of a work of art, they see a painting, sculpture or photograph as a conclusion, an end point, he said. But, that overlooks the ongoing role of process and discovery, and the search for an elusive truth that pushes an artist onward.
Martinez Celaya grapples with these knotty questions, both in his art and in his writing about art, literature and life.
“I come here every day and I make these paintings to make sense of life,” he said. “If I’m not writing or painting I begin to float, I have no idea of what I’m doing.”
The night before an interview he had painted for nine hours. When he is in his studio, he said, “the time disappears.”
Martinez Celaya, who was born in Cuba in 1964, grew up in Spain and Puerto Rico. The sense of dislocation or impermanence that can come from moving relatively frequently as a child shaped how he viewed life.
“Exile just confirmed for me a certain separation and distance. It made me more observant than I already was,” he said.
Trying to sort out the questions that often preoccupy an adolescent — what are truth, compassion and justice? — pointed Martinez Celaya toward artists, poets, philosophers and writers from beyond his largely southern and Latin upbringing.
The Russians: novelists Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Bulgakov and Pasternak; and poets Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam. The philosophers: the Danish Soren Kierkegaard and the German Arthur Schopenhauer.
“It was with them I felt the most comfort,” he said. “Even though my own internal making had a domestic Latin component, parts of my personality were already rather North-like.”
Three of the landscapes on which he’s been working distill the northern winter to its essence: the darkness, the sense of being swallowed by the cold and damp, a line of trees in a forest, deep tire tracks in the snow, the way winter reveals but also conceals.
“I’ve always been interested in Nordic imagery, maybe as a counterpoint to where I grew up,” said Martinez Celaya. “Mud and snow imagery is seeping its way through me. That oppressiveness and darkness of winter are metaphors I’m interested in.”
They’re not the only paintings in the studio, by any means. The painting that first confronts a visitor is of a blackened tree, looking as if it’s been consumed by fire, against a backdrop of febrile color.
There are paintings of boys and men, who have a quality of absolute stillness as they take the measure of the landscapes around them. There is a painting of mountains outlined against a flaming sky, a metaphysical landscape, Martinez Celaya said, that shows a “waterfall of milk on a black landscape.”
He has deliberately left the edges of some of his paintings blank so that you see the white grain of the canvas, or has let paint dribble down in an unexpected way to remind the viewer that this is, after all, an illusion.
“What is this, really? What’s really at stake here?” he said.
Martinez Celaya might work for years on a single painting. He will redo a painting, though, if he thinks he’s over-worked it, technically and thematically. If the mystery at its heart is diluted to the point of nothingness, if painting is simply a question of mechanics, where is the challenge, and the pleasure?
“I’m trying to discover something new in each work,” he said.
His paintings in the Hopkins Center studio are large in scale but by comparison to some of his other paintings, which can reach 8 by 10 feet, they are relatively modest. But they’re still big enough that you could walk into them, if you think of paintings as environments that you could enter.
“I’m interested in being intimate: going into them as opposed to looking through them,” Martinez Celaya said.
Despite New York’s role as an epicenter of the art world, and his appreciation of the city’s dynamism, Martinez Celaya shied away from moving there to pursue his career.
“New York seems overtly defined by power, by everything human, and by Culture with a capital ‘C.’ Los Angeles is more confusing and less “a thing” than New York, but exciting for that reason. Also, L.A. is a sliver of people living by the coast in a mostly desolated and magnificent landscape, and I like that,” Martinez Celaya later wrote in an email.
Over the years Martinez Celaya’s work has been exhibited at and collected by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Hood Museum, among others. He has lectured widely in this country at colleges, universities and museums as well as at the American Academy in Berlin.
Most recently he has exhibited at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., as well as at galleries in London and Stockholm.
His work, said Hood Museum Director John Stomberg, shows Martinez Celaya’s capacity for bringing to life philosophical questions about the nature of the world in a way that is thoughtful, but not arcane.
“In his paintings he engages images the way poets approach words. He presents subjects, such as a horse, a boy, or a jewel, to which we all bring our personal interpretations, but combines them in ways that allow ambiguity and allusion to draw us into a world of expanded meaning,” Stomberg wrote.
This month, Martinez Celaya will return to Cuba to look at sites where he will be installing work, along the Malecon, or esplanade, in Havana, and for the Havana Biennial in November. (It is his first trip back since he was 15.)
Martinez Celaya was also at Dartmouth in 2014 as a Montgomery Fellow, when he created an installation for the Hood Museum.
He likes Dartmouth’s size and spirit. “The combination of those things have made me really attached to the community. It feels like something of a second home,” he said.
Martinez Celaya is “very generous with his time and very articulate. With some artists there is a concentration on the visual and he has given equal balance to the word and the vision,” said Jane Carroll, assistant dean of faculty at the college who also teaches art history and directs the Roth Visiting Scholar program.
“He is the opposite of the hermit who doesn’t want to work with people, he wants to share ideas as much as possible,” Carroll added. (Martinez Celaya’s Hopkins Center studio is open to Dartmouth students and staff, and to the wider community, he said.)
In his last talk at the college, Martinez Celaya will discuss the idea of “the artist as a prophet offering a counterpoint to a very cynical view of the world.” Part and parcel of that is considering the definition of an artist.
“No one is sure what an artist is,” Martinez Celaya said. “So there is no sense of how to teach an artist. What does it mean to train an artist in academia?”
While the intellect clearly plays a primary role in how he approaches his work, it is not the driving factor. “I think the role of intelligence and the intellect is to reveal and then move out of the way. So, I want my work (to) not be or to seem intellectual, even if many intellectual questions were considered along the way.”
Critics and academics often place so much emphasis on the meaning, and the intellectual principles and social and cultural context in which an art work exists, that they can overlook the physicality of painting or sculpting, its transformative power, and how an artist actually executes his or her conception of a work, Celaya said.
“It’s easier to talk about ideas rather than how paint lays on the surface,” he said.
Enrique Martinez Celaya will give a talk about “The Artist” on Monda, at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter Hall at Dartmouth.
Openings and Receptions
W. David Powell, of Underhill, Vt., will have a show of his work in the exhibition “The Golden Era of the New Dawn” at White River Gallery in South Royalton. The show opens Saturday and runs through July 1. An opening reception is planned for June 3, from 4 to 6 p.m.
As part of First Friday in White River Junction, Scavenger Gallery celebrates its fifth anniversary with a wine tasting and party from 5:30 to 7:30.
Also on Friday, the League of NH Craftsmen Hanover Fine Craft Gallery holds a special “Taste of the League” reception from 5 to 7 p.m. The gallery will exhibit works by jeweler Deirdre Donnelly and fiber artist Tarja Cockell. The show continues through June.
Torin Porter, whose 12-foot-sculpture Astronomer stands outside the entrance to AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, and who has also exhibited frequently at the gallery, is the focus of the exhibition “Before Words” at Mitchell Giddings Fine Art in Brattleboro. There is an opening reception today at 5 p.m. Porter will give a gallery talk on June 10 from 5 to 7 p.m. The show continues through June 18.
The Center for the Arts in Lake Sunapee presents a trio of exhibitions throughout the Lake Sunapee region. An exhibition of landscape photography by James Mudie and photographs of flowers by Richard Gulezian are on view at the Lake Sunapee Bank’s micro gallery. There will be a reception Friday from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
Mary Beth Westward, a painter of landscapes, flora and wildlife, will exhibit her work at Whipple Hall in New London, beginning this Friday with a reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
Finally, the second annual Center for the Arts exhibition, featuring oil, watercolor, and acrylic paintings, as well as drawings and mixed media, goes on view Friday at the New London Inn with a reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The featured artists are: Molly and Corbett Leith, Jean Connolly, Elizabeth D’Amico, Ludmila Gayvoronsky, Mary Gerakaris, Laura Graveline, Christine Hawkins, Linda Hefner, Loren Howard, Penny Koburger, Luci Lesmerises, Yvonne Shukovsky, Rick Stockwell and Mimi Wiggin.
Of Note
The Atrium of the Claremont Opera House is the host Saturday for “Springtime in Paris,” a charity auction that includes artwork by students from New England Classical Academy in Claremont, and pieces donated by sculptor Ernest Montenegro, printmaker Nancy Wightman, the estate of painter Mildred Davison, woodworker Stanley Dole, mixed media artist Angie Follensbee-Hall and sculptor Randy Adams.
Tickets for the “Springtime in Paris” Art Exhibit and Charity Auction are $15 and are on sale at Claremont Opera House, claremontoperahouse.com, the Cornish General Store and the New England Classical Academy office during school hours on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.To see some of the artwork available for auction go to the classical academy’s Facebook page.
There will be a silent auction from 4 to 6 p.m. The live charity auction starts at 6 p.m. and runs until 7:30 pm.
Ongoing
Arabella, Windsor. The gallery exhibits works by local artists and artisans in a variety of media, including jewelry, oils, acrylics, photography, watercolors, pastels and textiles.
ArtisTree Gallery, South Pomfret. “MUD,” a show in which artists play variations on the theme of mud season, runs through Saturday.
BigTown Gallery, Rochester, Vt. An exhibition of photographs by Rosamond Purcell, the Boston writer and photographer, runs through July 29. Prints and sculpture by the late Hugh Townley are on view through Sept. 10.
Chandler Gallery, Randolph. “These Green Mountains,” an exhibition of work by Vermont artists and artisans, runs through June 17.
Converse Free Library, Lyme. Lyme artist Matt Brown exhibits “Woodblock Prints: Parts and Process” in the Betty Grant Gallery through May 31.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon. “Shedding Light on the Northern Forest,” an exhibition of paintings by Kathleen Kolb with accompanying poetry by Verandah Porche, is on view in the Endoscopy Hallway Gallery, Level 4, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, through June.
Also on view at the hospital are: the annual employee and volunteer art show; paintings by Helen Shulman and Annette Jaret; photographs by Ron Levenson and oils and watercolors by Patricia Sweet-MacDonald.
Aidron Duckworth Museum, Meriden. “geraldautenpower,” a show of drawings and projects by Gerald Auten that examines the concept of “power” is up through June 4. “Healing Arts: Painting & Poetry,” by Aidron Duckworth is on view through July 23.
Hood Downtown, Hanover. “World Processor,” an exhibition of illuminated globes by Ingo Gunther, runs through May 28. A related exhibition, “Mining Big Data: Luis Delgado-Qualtrough and Amy Balkin” in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, ends Sunday.
Kilton Library, West Lebanon. A selection of work from Mount Lebanon School students will be on view through May.
Long River Gallery and Gifts, White River Junction. Lyme artist Stephanie Reininger exhibits “Spring’s Flowers and Colors” through Friday. For more information go to tinyurl.com/firstfridaylongriver.
Norwich Public Library. “Odanaksis: Plein Air Paintings,” an exhibition of work by artists Anne Webster Grant, Gail M. Barton, Helen Elder, Susan Rump, Linda Landry, Jo Tate and Becky Cook continues through May 26. See a related exhibition at the Zollikofer Gallery at the Hotel Coolidge (see below).
Philip Read Memorial Library, Plainfield. Prints by Barnard artist Sabra Field are on view through July 1.
Scavenger Gallery, White River Junction. The works of printmaker Lois Beatty and sculptor and woodworker Ria Blaas are on view, in addition to the jewelry of Stacy Hopkins.
SculptureFest, Woodstock. The annual celebration of three-dimensional art generally ends when foliage season does, but 80 percent of the show is still on view. “Grounding,” a show of site-specific work curated by sculptors Jay Mead and Edythe Wright, is on view at the King Farm. For more information, go to sculpturefest.org.
Tunbridge Public Library. “Adventures in Weaving,” a show by Braintree, Vt. artist Susan Rockwell runs through May 19.
Zollikofer Gallery, Hotel Coolidge, White River Junction. “The Spirit of Odanaksis,” an exhibition of work by members of a group Upper Valley plein air painters, is on view through Wednesday.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.