Description
There are signs everywhere that the contemporary art world is growing weary of its theoretical excesses. A number of recent exhibitions focusing on beauty, spirituality, and transcendence seem to demonstrate that, if nothing else, the art world is uncomfortable with its collective unbelief. There seems to be an increased desire to recover art's capacity to be more than ironic, to use art for more than pointing to ideologies or illustrating politics. Artists are taking a leap of faith in making artworks that stimulate our imaginations and bring us into contact with the sacred. Enrique Martinez Celaya's recent paintings are testimony to this rediscovery of art's ability to manifest aesthetic and spiritual presence. Created during an intense three-year period, these large-scale densely painted black canvases make an aesthetic covenant with the viewer that smelly oils and sticky tar on rough canvas can tell us something about the artist, the world, and even ourselves. Curated by Daniel A. Siedell of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Enrique Martinez Celaya, The October Cycle, 2000-2002, offers an in-depth visual exploration of one of the most comprehensive and ambitious aesthetic statements in contemporary painting. This publication affords the opportunity for both the artist and curator to reflect on the work's meaning and significance. Siedell's essay explores the development of Martinez Celaya's oeuvre through the lens of a spiritual quest that unites the aesthetic, the ethical, and the transcendent. He sees in these recent paintings the distillation of past influences and interests and the full maturation of a painter at the height of his creative powers. The artist offers his own reflections on this cycle of paintings, exploring its origins in his poetry, philosophical investigations, and complex life experiences. Neither the artist nor the curator offers definitive explanations of the October Cycle. Rather, they clear out interpretive spaces in which the viewers and readers can experience the "presence" of these paintings through the lens of their own imaginative worlds. Book jacket.
