Miami Artist Enrique Martinez Celaya Announces Art Lecture

Today I am blogging about Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya because he has been making quite impressive contributions to Miami's art community.  Mark your calendar for lecture #10 in Enrique Martinez Celaya's outstanding Whale & Star Studio Lecture Series.  At 7 pm on  Wednesday May 16, 2012, his studio will present art historian and critic Matthew Biro discussing "La  Ribaute," Anselm Kiefer's studio-estate in Barjac, France, which has been called Kiefer's total work of art. Lecture open to the public for $5 admission fee. RSVP's required; to RSVP call the studio at 305-576-6160. Whale and Star Studio is located at 2215 NW 1st Place, Miami, FL. Note that Biro is Chair and Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Michigan.  Some of his bio info from press release: "Originally trained as a continental philosopher, he came to art history through an interest in aesthetics and visual thinking."  For more info, see www.whaleandstar.com and www.thelectureproject.com

First things first: More visual arts news in Miami

When I was recently on assignment in Wynwood for ARTnews, so glad that my BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace and I could visit this most intriguing solo show for Onajide Shabaka, also in Wynwood. He is showing his numerous black synthetic rubber cutouts and monochromatic acrylic drawings on paper, loosely depicting Florida flora such as banana trees and mangrove leaves.   It is on view through May 12, 2012 at GalerieSchusterMiami, 2051 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. See also www.galleryschuster.com To get in touch with this excellent artist, who certainly deserves more recognition in Miami than he has received, email him at onajide@gmail.com or see his website at www.art3st.com

Antonia Wright must be completing her one-month stint living a new life as a homeless woman while she is an artist-in-residence, a residency she began April 2, at Lotus House Women's Shelter, again in Wynwood. I understand that she is the first artist to do this--what an remarkable project. For more info about her experiences at Lotus House, see www.antoniawright.com (click on Projects).  For more info about this wonderful example of philanthropy in Miami, see www.lotushouseshelter.org.

Here's an event with a lecture and panel discussion I wish I could attend, but with my wack-o driving issues, most likely will not. But maybe readers who can easily get to Boca Raton will.  Event is "Feeling the Squeeze: The Future of the Beaches in Florida" at 8 pm on May 3, at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Catch this event in Building #51, Rm 101, next to the Schmidt Center Gallery of FAU. For 1/2 hr before and after the panel discussion, you can see the related and surely thought-provoking exhibit, "Surfing Florida: A Photographic History," which will be on view through May 12.  Lecture is by Tom Anderson, a legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is one of several humanities scholars who have contributed to the exhibit "Surfing Florida" by putting together this May 3 panel discussion. This lecture and panel will address environmental issues, including environmental law and the legal concerns of Florida's surfers. For more info on the panelists, this event, and the exhibit, see www.fau.edu/galleries/

So sad to reflect on the recent passing of art collector Richard Shack, 1926-2012. I simply find it so hard to believe that we will never again have one of our conversations about the Miami art scene. I always learned so much from his astute observations, and whenever I needed to speak to him about some issue on my visual arts beat, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Go to the home page of The Miami Foundation at www.miamifoundation.org to learn more about this courageous man and how you can honor his legacy to Miami with a contribution to The Miami Foundation. There you will also find a link to The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor J. Brecher.

This just in. . .Michelle Weinberg tells me via email that her show at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St in Miami's Wynwood) opens May 11. For more info see www.michelleweinberg.com and www.dorschgallery.com  Also: At Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91st St in Miami, there's an opening Friday, April 27 from 7-10 pm. See drawings and mixed media collages by Shoshanna Weinberger, also in the Project Space see group show curated by Alice Raymond, with work by artists Antonia Wright, Kerry Phillips, Loriel Beltran, Dogan Arslanoglu. More info at www.cjazzart.com

THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald March 2004

His paintings come from places where most of the lights have flickered and died.

Looking at them, you feel as if you've stumbled in from a leafy outdoors noisy with sunlight bouncing off cars and kids, having just pushed the door open onto a house boarded up for years.  Other paintings can make you feel as you've left a familiar kitchen, bright and busy with pots simmering and knives chopping, and then stepped into a living room just as the power fails, when armchairs and family photos vanish into a chilly black hole.

The heavy darkness in the paintings of Enrique Martinez Celaya can make you blink and squint.  You want to  peer into their light-devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for his chalky white outlines of men, women, and children, trying to figure out where these hollowed-out families, who are really more phantom than flesh, belong.

The tantalizing pleasures and secrets gingerly offered by this dark art, part of the artist's "October Cycle"  now at the Museum of Art in  Fort Lauderdale, are dense with layers of oil paint and emulsified tar.  They usually outweigh the annoying way their murky, mucky surfaces can trigger eye-strain.  As your eyes become accustomed to Martinez Celaya's moody nighttime palette, the artist lures you into the delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognize how even a contrasting, glowering abyss of loss, of black near-nothingness, can pump rare strength into the faint glow of what has survived.

In a talk last week at the Museum of Art, the artist tried to illuminate his aesthetic of absence and loss in a body of work that includes photography and sculpture as well as painting.  Based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya has seen his career take off in the past decade, with his art entering museum collections in Germany and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.  One of his paintings also hangs in the striking corporate collection at Miami's Four Seasons Hotel.

"I was fascinated by the way he changes from one exhibition to another," said Jorge Santis, a curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, who invited the artist to create a large-scale mural near the entrance to the exhibit.  "There are so many facets to his work.  It's realistic, it is minimalist, but it is also romantic, passionate.  I think there's an inner suffering in many of his pieces that comes from his Cuban roots."

During his time in Fort Lauderdale, Martinez Celaya wanted to eat only Cuban food, explaining that it was hard to come by where he lives now, Santis said.  In talking about his own varied work, Martinez Celaya doesn't express such visceral desires.  He can wax into a passionate but windy philosopher, even a killjoy when it comes to understanding why some visual artists get their kicks from tweaking the excesses of pop culture, a subject his severe, almost monastic paintings avoid.

MISERY IN MADRID

The absence of another subject dramatically shadowed his talk.  He barely grazed over his memories of leaving his boyhood home in Palos, Cuba, a small town surrounded by sugar-cane fields and located on a road leading to Varadero Beach.  In  1972, when Martinez Celaya was 8, he and his family moved from Cuba to Madrid.  It was a miserable life of severe poverty, played out against seasons of cold and early dusk, beginning with the month of October.  That's the telling namesake for his series of 22 paintings now at the museum, in a show organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska.

"I have fought so hard to make the painings not just be about exile," he explained, with an expression that combined frown, sigh, and a quick, rueful smile.   "Exile implies loss but there are other ways of loss.  In each talk I add something and I take something out of the story."

But his is a story, like the "October Cycle," about etching thin rays of light in dark times and places.  Sometimes those rays of light are as weak as the winter sun, like those outlining a father and son in his painting "The Distance."

"Spain was such a shock.  We were beyond poor. My father couldn't find a job.  We lived in a storage place without a place to take a bath.  It was not just exile, it was the sense of being completely dispossessed," he recalled, as he walked around his show at the museum.  "Creditors were coming to the house banging on the door."

Their digs in Madrid had no windows.  Tensions flared.  It was such a contrast to life at his grandfather's home in Palos, where Martinez Celaya spent much of his time, while his father worked on a cane plantation and his mother taught school.  Comfortable despite its layers of peeling paint, the house opened onto a sunny courtyard shaded lightly by a fir tree.

In Madrid, Martinez Celaya looked to art as an escape, though he didn't care to paint the courtyards of his past.  Somehow he laid his hands on a book about Leonardo da Vinci and spent hours trying to mimic the secret of Mona Lisa's smile in his own drawings.  In a talk he shows a skillful drawing he made after arriving in Spain.  It was the face of someone sleeping, but the slumber seemed so airless and final.  Its disembodied clarity resembled a death mask.  "Definitely our life there [in Spain] was a death," he said.  "There was a hopeless kind of life.  Every day was the same as the day before.  I was just waiting for something to change."

SCIENTIFIC TRAINING

Change came in 1975, when the family moved to Puerto Rico.  Martinez Celaya studied art but develped another passion: science.  Bright and creative, he built a laser for a 10th grade science project and won an award from the National Congress of Science.  He graduated from high school as valedictorian and headed off to Cornell to study applied physics.  Next came graduate school in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a job at a laser company, where he patented four inventions.  But much of this time he was still painting, selling art in San Francisco parks.

In the late 1980s, he left scientific academe and returned full-time to art, and later earned an MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  "I did it because I simply couldn't afford to leave my life outside once I entered the door of the lab, which is something you have to do as a physicist," he said.  "I did it because I wanted to bring my life into my work."

In the "October Cycle," Martinez Celaya paints the mysteries, sorrows, and longings of life as both parent and child.  At 37, he is a stocky man with short dark hair and a penchant for soft-spoken but intense conversation, voicing surprise at how much life as a father has seeped into his life as an artist.  He and his wife of five years, Alexandra Williams, have two small children, Sebastian and Gabriela.  "Gabriela (First)" is one of the most memorable paintings here.  It shows a mother tossing a baby in the air, or perhaps catching her as she falls.  It is not sentimental.  The figures gleam as the barest suggestions of life, their reaching-but-not-touching-hands more vivid than their faces.  Six small dashes of light float across the black void cloaking these figures.

As an aside, the artist explains that the points of light represent his daughter's six birthmarks, the possible symptom of a congenital disease.  When he painted this work, he and his wife were in the midst of determining whether she had the disease--learning eventually that she did not.

But whether you know this or not, the painting is a hauntingly spare scene of life's fragile bonds, of gifts that come and go, and of the capacity of art to say much with a few threads of light that are deceptively simple.  Like the pinpoint beams of a laser, Martinez Celaya's pale brushstrokes pierce their target, life, at its core.