Art Review
Martinez Celaya shifting 'away from aesthetic choices'

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

"Quiet Night (Recollection)" is by Enrique Martinez Celaya, an art professor at Pomona College. The Contemporary Museum Enrique Martinez Celaya, 1992-2001 Through Oct. 21 The Contemporary Museum, 2411 Makiki Heights Drive 526-1322 Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m; Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., closed Monday "Found Words" Through Sept. 28 Gallery on the Pali, 2500 Pali Highway Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays; 1-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday 526-1191 "Bead Into Fall," Eclectic Adornment V Through Sept. 21 Gallery at Ward Centre Hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. (Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) 597-8034

"Because of this, there is a connection with furniture and the decorative, a connection with everything else that is visual.

"I was trying to see if I could shift the work away from aesthetic choices, so when you know my name. you would not necessarily know what it looks like or maybe what it feels like. That shift has taken many years. I'm still working on it."

The museum is hosting the artist's premiere solo museum exhibition featuring his most recent work, conceived and organized by the museum's chief curator, James Jensen. This is the first stop for this traveling show.

The internationally respected, Cuban-born artist Martinez Celaya is young in years to have come so far, so fast. At 37, even he is surprised by his success. He retains a passion for the process of making art that began in his childhood.

Preferring to work on many pieces at once, Martinez Celaya begins with a vague notion and distills it through painting, sculpture and photography, using whatever materials evoke his elegiac and lucid views.

A physicist with four patents pending on his work with lasers, a poet with two published books of poetry, a painter and sculptor with numerous exhibitions and publications to his credit, an award-winning photographer and an art professor at Pomona College (he lives in Los Angeles), he is an artist worthy of our time.

If it were possible to attend the exhibit with a set of listening eyes, it would facilitate "suspending your prejudice," as the artist asks, of the visual. This is artwork to listen to. The paintings refuse certainty and confuse the conscious, logical mind. The viewer is often transported, without warning, to deeper places in the subconscious.

In the oil on canvas, "Acceptance of Longing," washed-out grays and whites reveal a hummingbird lying on its back on a scratched elliptical platform bathed in light. It's a metamorphosis waiting for a witness.

Due in part to the artist's intention to depersonalize his work, Martinez Celaya prefers a disciplined, circumnavigational approach, sacrificing the first layers of sometimes beautiful images with erasures and divisions to explore places that are, for him, outside the autobiographical. Any one of his paintings might have been painted over many times, until there is a "presence, another entity — something pointing at that boundary outside of the known," mysterious, spiritual, haunting, shadowed. It is possible to sense this alchemy at times. Images are not as they appear initially.

Underneath their exterior, memories of previous drawings pulse, rendering the work more dreamy than realistic — and difficult to categorize.

"Quiet Night (Recollection)" is both calming and disturbing. A softly sketched, eyeless, white, severed head with an exclamatory shade of crimson nose and mouth is surrounded by (two painted and one sketched) white hummingbirds in flight.

The fugitive elements in many of Martinez Celaya's works are provocative. Yet, there is also a redemptive tenderness. The almost life-sized acrylic on silver gelatin print, "Frankness (Work of Mercy)," is a figured landscape of a luminous and softly polka-dotted dark figure — the artist — standing at the water's edge with a painted hummingbird aloft at the throat, the place of the breath, life and language.

This exhibition clearly defines and carries the viewer through the stages, separated by the rooms of the museum, of Martinez Celaya's growth as an artist: "I work in the known towards the unknown and then move on to a new evolution."

The artist's biography and bibliography are available at martinezcelaya.com; a hardbound book is sold in the museum's gift shop to accompany the exhibit.

Charlene Tashima's beads are part of display by the Eclectic Adornment group at the Gallery at Ward Centre. Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

A group exhibition of artwork that incorporates language, "Found Words" was curated by Alshaa Rayne and is on exhibit at the one-room art space at the Unitarian Church on Pali Highway.

Rayne's work is the strongest in the show. Mixed-media collages express her female experiences: "Untamed Kitchen," "Ready or Not," "To Tell The Truth" and "Menopause." One of her trio of small connected wooden shrine boxes with found objects, "Big Toe," bears the inscription, "Nothing fills nothing. Today is ours and Heaven is in its place."

"Why I Write" is a riveting revelation scribbled on a blindfolded doll with a pen bound to its arm: "I'm lonely, love has never been enough." The doll is chained to a book of collaged and painted poetic words. Powerful images.

Charlene Hughes has quilted and interactive words, Yolanta Maria Strazdas has cryptic words in her painting, Elisabeth Knoke-Dieckvoss uses her father and grandfather's words, Kaethe Kauffman paints and collages childhood memories. One of Sabra Rae Feldstein's mixed-media pieces is inscribed "May Your Heart Never Be Hungry." Words fly.

Whimsical beads

If a need arises to be whimsical after all of this, the fifth offering of the Eclectic Adornment group show at the Gallery at Ward Centre may be just the thing. This group of bead artists is the stuff that great musical bands are made of. They play off each other, sometimes using each other's beads in their jewelry creations. Alethia Donathan, Joel Park, Charlene Tashima and Ann Teruya craft lampwork glass beads, Barbara Edelstein needle-weaves beads, Patricia Greene, and Alicia Kawano Oh incorporate their raku beads, and Mary Kamiya assembles seed and vintage beads.

Editor's note: Advertiser art critic Virginia Wageman is on leave; artist, teacher and former gallery owner Victoria Gail-White is sitting in.