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Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things
at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the Trojan hero weep as he remembered those he had loved and lost. This famous poetic passage about the power of painting continues to fascinate scholars because it is open to multiple subjective and objective interpretations.
As a physicist, Celaya is trained to ask questions that uncover contradictions that do admit the closure of an answer in the realm of quantum mechanics. Celaya uses the poetic implications of Virgil’s phrase to make a quantum leap into the lofty realm of scientific query regarding the way everything is interconnected in a larger continuum where nothing actually exists in-and-of itself. His paintings also raise aesthetic questions about the nature of painting itself, as a both a construction and a locus for transformative emotional experiences. I left this exhibition with more questions than when I arrived and returned only to leave with further questions about the wondrous connection between the act of seeing and what I had seen.
