Patricia Low is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new work by LA-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya at Patricia Low Contemporary, Venice, the artist’s first with the gallery. Titled Here To Kneel, Voyagers, the show brings together nine works integrating nuanced observations of transitory experiences with enduring, universal concerns, such as redemption, memory, time, myth, and nature. The paintings on view bring together complete and incomplete parts, where painted figurative details and images of nature coexist with sketchily drawn seas, architectural references, words, or lines of poetry. The show’s poetic title, with its invocation to surrender, conveys the particular vulnerability and sense of humility that attends displacement, whether from one’s home, one’s culture, or oneself in the present moment. It also references, along with certain symbols and allusions found in the works – a lion, water – the show’s location in Venice, a city synonymous with seafaring and transit. Long a touchstone in Martínez Celaya‘s work, the sea features in these new works in the form of boats, a conch, and coral fronds turned into candelabras. Coinciding with the 60th Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere, Martínez Celaya‘s exhibition explores the notion of foreignness as a psychic as well as physical state.

Painted on canvas drop cloths, linen, and paper, the works continue the artist’s long-held quest to reconcile word and image, where fragmentary forms and lines of poetry have equal footing. In each, the ground is drawn in charcoal and sealed, and these grounds collide rather than cooperate with the painted elements. Text may or may not be visible, but each is conceived as a visual poem. In one of the paintings, The Leading Light, from 2024, a charcoal seascape is seen through a clutch of outsize yellow flowers, a bird seemingly perched on one of their stems. An enigmatic line of text that may or may not allude to the artist’s native Cuba – “You and I are disappearing but plantains are holding on” – is partially obscured by a radiant star, the script faded in parts like the frayed edges of a memory. In another, The Vocation, also 2024, a segmented lion occupies most of the canvas, its constituent parts placed at slightly skewed angles, behind which are the knotted branches of a tree in charcoal. Floating among these elements is a collection of colourful geometric shapes that gesture, forlornly, towards a sense of order and which occur in several other paintings. Elsewhere, figures appear painted or in shadowy charcoal, variously holding symbolic items, or pictured in ambiguous situations. In his conflicting, captivating fragments, Martínez Celaya relays the extraordinary conditions of a reality whose brightness in the moment renders it simultaneously unreal.