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Yesterday Enrique Martínez Celaya walked Lita Barrie & I through his new body of work for two upcoming installations.
We discovered Enrique’s new paintings about Robert Frost’s apple tree orchard which was tended to by his son Carol. Above the tree, the words “everything is waiting for you” are written ~ the promise that contains all possible outcomes. The plane in the night sky soared above time and remained for us a constant.
We discussed poetry, painting & fairytales. The raw elements of a fairytale seem to float between the ocean and the sky in Enrique’s studio. And large symbols like a compass for the imagination. The raw materials of his childhood letters to his father, were adapted to large scale paintings for his upcoming installation. And a simple Kathe Kollowitz lithograph hangs above two dried out apples on his desk.
Enrique’s work has moved me since I first came across it in 2017 when we shared features in an issue of my late fathers magazine Modern Painters. My article chronicled my father’s founding of the magazine in 1986 and the relationships between art criticism and cinema today. Enrique’s article coincided with his exhibition at LA Louvre. Walking through it I felt I had come across a painter who had embodied poetry more than any other that comes to mind, today I still believe this to be true.
Our discussion which spanned the follies of poeticism, the imitations of intellectualism in the face of truth, Robert Frost and the allegories of art in our lives.
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The next day I started writing a poem from the perspective of Carol Frost, (an antagonist in Enrique’s upcoming exhibition) ;
Fields That Once Were There
In the orchard of my father,
I wonder free ~ contained by the fence and just as far as I see.
I watched finches eating rotten apples by the side of the road this morning,
It was raining in a puddle nearby.
I saw fields reflected in their eyes,
Fields that once we’re there.
Bushes that now are bare,
Bounding with satyrs and hares.
I saw in the puddles of rain, the finches’ complexion,
The clouds above and heaven’s reflection.
The finch’s home no longer grows here,
I reached my hand into the puddle,
And plucked from it a soaked rose.
The beast in me is alive again,
I feel bones burning beneath my skin.
And I told this to the finch.
He replied;
“The stars are burning too,
But they are cooled by the blue night,
And they make the earth glow with light.
Golden leaves wrap the fruit of fortune.”
He built all this for me, every tree planted with me in mind,
But did he mind to ask, what I did want for me and mine:
A family of my own one day, a task to ask at heavens gate.
For when I’m gone the task will be too late,
His weary eyes dropped past his tools and tired hands to mucky boots that barely stood him upright.
And all this now was not to freedom built an orchard from saplings grow day and night,
It was more tree house that trapped me in the door for vines that wrapped around its side.
What sketched he said were daubles,
what I wrote he said was awful.
And those fields retracted,
Those fields that once were there.
When I was a boy I saw fields that stretched out to a place I saw the finches flying in sky.
Horizon bled to shutting, each and every night.
I saw a future where a life lived on my own,
A family where our fields of ripened fruit had grown.
And book upon the table, filled with my poems.
by Laurence Fuller, 2024
