Florence, at Secci Gallery the first Italian exhibition of paintings by Enrique Martínez Celaya

Until July 29, 2023, Secci Gallery is hosting The Sea Memory (Lost), a solo exhibition by Enrique Martínez Celaya (Havana, 1964), an American artist living in Los Angeles, who is presenting for the first time in Italy a selection of his pictorial works. While at the Museo Marino Marini, until May 29, the large-scale installations of Looking and Waiting: Enrique Martínez Celaya. Selected Sculptures 2005-2023, the sea and flowers, eternal and permanent in their transience, are the dominant subjects of the paintings offered in the gallery, made with oil and wax on canvas, which explore the connection between what remains and what vanishes, between two opposing temporal conditions: transience and eternity.

For Martínez Celaya, art is not only a cultural practice, but also an ethical endeavor that transforms thought into action and allows us to better understand the world, nature, our surroundings and, therefore, ourselves. To interpret reality, his paintings make use of elements such as flowers, the sea and rivers, images that are common and essential but never trivial, superficial or purely ornamental. Behind the apparent simplicity, these works always conceal deeper experiences, speak to us of feelings, of hope, of nostalgia, of our fragility.

“On relatively large surfaces,” Giorgio Verzotti explains in the text accompanying the exhibition, “the artist paints images of flowers on sea backgrounds: wild or garden flowers, mallows, bright yellow daffodils or lilies, sunflowers and proteas, delineated with attention to detail, as one would for a portrait, but with a wavy, dripping paint, almost impetuous in defining the waves. The association between flowers and the sea has symbolic value, both alluding to what is transient, passing, ephemeral. These natural elements become emblems of becoming, and it seems that the artist paints them in large dimensions in order to stop them, while the agitation of the painting announces their destiny of impermanence.”

In the eyes of the beholder, the sea is always the same, unchanging, but in reality it is never the same; it transforms, constantly changing with the breaking of the waves, with the direction of light, with the inexorable passage of time and with the erosion of the coasts. Similarly, flowers bloom and die following an extremely short life cycle. We, with awe and wonder, catch their beauty and fragrance, but with melancholy, because aware of their transience we know that, before long, the petals will wither, fall off, and we will no longer be able to smell their fragrance, which dissipates into the air.

But transience is meaningless without permanence, and it is in the ephemeral that what is enduring is revealed, Martínez Celaya explains in an excerpt from his diary, dated February 2023, which the artist has made public on his personal website. The combination of flowers/sea thus acquires a double valence, turning the theme of precariousness into a positive one. The sea, in fact, is what it has always been: a permanent reference by which we measure and locate ourselves, an entity that shapes and defines civilization and lifestyles, a universal boundary and a means to navigate, to connect us. Flowers, on the other hand, represent rebirth, the strength of nature, the stubbornness of the will to be. The works in The Sea Memory (Lost) can, in this sense, be seen as portraits, where flowers replace the human figure and the sea, in the background, symbolizes time. They remind us that we are only passing through on this earth but, at the same time, they are witnesses to our permanence, to the continuity of life.

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author and former physicist whose works have been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, Distinguished Professor for the MFA in Fine Arts atOtis College of Art and Design, and Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He has produced exhibitions, projects and interventions in museums, galleries and other cultural venues, including the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, the StateHermitage Museumin St. Petersburg, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany. His works are in 56 international public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. Martínez Celaya is the author of numerous books, including the two volumes Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010-2017 and 1990-2010, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020 and 2011; and The Nebraska Lectures, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. His work has been the subject of several monographic publications, including Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: toward a map of everything, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021, Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021, Martínez Celaya, Work and Documents 1990-2015, Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2016, and Enrique Martínez Celaya: Working Methods, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2012.

Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He began his formal art training as a painter’s apprentice at the age of 12. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics and a minor in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a Master of Science degree with a specialization in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted part of his physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and holds several laser device patents. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and received an MFA with highest honors from theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara, where he was also a Regents Fellow and Junior Fellow of theInterdisciplinary Humanities Center. In 1997 he was awarded the Art Here and Now prize by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1998, Martínez Celaya created the internationally recognized publishing house Whale & Star, which publishes books on art, poetry, art practice and critical theory. Prior to his current academic appointments, he held the positions of Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska, and Associate Professor at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University. In 2020 he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from Otis College of Art and Design, where he gave the commencement address. He is a member of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation. He serves on the Board of Trustees of theOtis College of Art and Design, was artistic advisor to theAnderson Ranch Arts Center from 2018 to 2021, where he received the National Artist Award in 2007, and is a member of theInternational Advisory Council of the Hispanic Society of America. He has lectured around the world, including theAmerican Academy in Berlin, theArt Institute of Chicago, the Royal Drawing School, and theAspen Institute.

For all information, you can visit Secci Gallery’s official website.

Ph. credit: Stefano Maniero

Florence, at Secci Gallery the first Italian exhibition of paintings by Enrique Martínez Celaya

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