CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/15/2019

The landscape itself inhabits Enrique Martínez Celaya as a ghost in 'Landscape Painting Now'

Enrique Martínez Celaya's "The Empire" (2015) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, launching Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM at the Whitney Shop with a panel featuring Martínez Celaya, Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Matthew Wong and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky. "Trained as a scientist, [Martínez Celaya] imbues his work with the philosophical and spiritual issues that fascinate him," Schwabsky writes, "with roots ranging from the Catholicism of his Cuban forebears through American Transcendentalism to the hermeneutics and ontology of Martin Heidegger. Martínez Celaya remarks that much of his work involves 'the feeling of having arrived too late;' this too-lateness is what gives his art its poignancy. It has a double meaning when the works involve landscape: first, there's the sense that, while the painting does not convey a narrative, there was an event or a story that took place, as it were, just before we arrived on the scene, something that left its echo but remains in itself elusive. More than that, it's as if we might be too late for the landscape as such, that we may have arrived just in time to bid it farewell. This sad reflection could be an inevitable part of our relation to the earth and to images of the earth in the twenty-first century. And yet, as long as someone remains as a witness, there is still something to see, something haunting: 'The landscape itself,' Martínez Celaya says, 'inhabits me as a ghost.'"