Insight Within Arm’s Reach

What might it mean that the figures in Enrique Martinez Celaya’s work rarely meet our gaze? Their eyes are usually closed, and sometimes they’re beyond closed, not even articulated among their other features. Steeped in solitude and immersed in profound reckonings with the self, these figures cannot connect with our gaze because theirs is turned entirely inward. We, reflexively, turn inward too. And by the end of Martinez Celaya’s absorbing show at the Orange County Museum of Art, that same rich and unforgiving solitude has taken us over.

The show, organized by James Jensen for the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, surveys a decade of the Los Angeles artist’s work, from 1992 to the present. Painting, drawing, photography, sculpture--Martinez Celaya has tremendous facility with them all, singly and in combination. His reach is even broader than the show reveals, for he has also published several books of poetry and done graduate work in physics. His is a remarkably agile sensibility, ever attempting to articulate the nature of being.

Titles of many of the works refer to physical and emotional conditions: longing, tiredness, redemption, renunciation, fragility, return, possibility, remembering, mercy. Martinez Celaya doesn’t venture to illustrate or externalize these states as much as he conjures up forms around them, the way sound frames silence.

In “Pena (Sorrow)” (1997-99), a single large hand dominates the canvas. Rivulets of burnt brown paint drip from the slightly curled fingers, stilled in mid-reach. Martinez Celaya ends the hand at the wrist. Just where it would normally link to the arm, it hovers, disconnected. Reinforcing that disjunction are objects adhered to the canvas, objects that reek of loss and the past: flower petals, baby shoes and dried leaves, relics encrusted in tar.

“Bed (the Creek)” (1997) consists of an actual double bed, neatly made with two sets of pillows and an ivory embroidered spread. The picture of domestic security is complicated, though, by a shallow trough, a resin-lined dip in the covers, that runs down the center of the bed. A steady stream of clear water flows through this “creek” to the bed’s foot, where it splashes into a cooking pot that sits atop a stack of dinner plates. Is the water a life-force, a nourishing fluid that vitalizes, cleanses, regenerates? Or is the creek divisive, forging a rift in the marital bed?

Martinez Celaya’s work resists explanation more than most, because it resonates with quiet--with an interiority that defies language. Most writing about his work, including the essays in the show’s beautifully designed catalog, consists mostly of talking around it, cluttering its silence.

There is, in fact, a good deal of physical emptiness in the work, particularly in the paintings. A few primary motifs--hummingbirds, birch trees, flower petals and fragmented body parts--float within undefined, placeless spaces. White, black and brown predominate, and often the emotionally charged color of dried blood. Martinez Celaya creates sometimes breathtakingly beautiful objects, whether photographs that engage that medium’s indexical relationship to material reality; resin body casts, which correspond more directly to the physical world; or paintings, with their own emblematic grammar. Considering his focus on ineffable essences and intangible conditions, those objects have stunning physical presence.

The work does nestle into a visual tradition, however. The string of small lights around an early painting echoes installations by Christian Boltanski. The surfaces encrusted with dark debris bring to mind Anselm Kiefer, and the use of arterial, mapping lines recalls the work of Guillermo Kuitca--all of whom are equally attuned to issues of memory and the interiorization of history. Martinez Celaya wanders among influences the way he eases among media, his internal compass remaining strong.

He’s had plenty of practice with geographic moves. Born in Cuba in 1964, he moved to Spain at age 7, then to Puerto Rico, and attended universities (Cornell, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara) on both U.S. coasts. Since 1996, he’s lived in Venice.

The sense of displacement that permeates his work corresponds, naturally, to his experience of geographic exile, but also to something more primal--an utter solitude, an unfulfilled longing, an incompleteness. Martinez Celaya composes in what writer Andre Aciman calls “the key of loss.” Just as his work is physically spare but emotionally dense, so is it steeped in absence and yet a model of deeply reflective presence, of turning inward, eyes fixed on the soul.

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Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-1122, through Feb. 3. Closed Mondays.