Press release

Baldwin Gallery is proud to present our eighth show with contemporary figurative artist Enrique Martínez Celaya: new paintings and sculpture in a show entitled The Pale Threshold. Martínez Celaya’s works highlight the disorienting effects of atmospheric changes when the senses first recognize the underlying alteration connected by his vivid dreamscape imagery. He presents this awareness as familiar to all exiles, who must construct from leftover impressions an imagined world and identity wherein one exchanges a known reality for a projection created by the imagination. Martínez Celaya’s personal iconographies populate the works and seek to confront issues of identity, loss, and connection, producing potent mnemonic sensory monuments to memory and longing.

Born in Palos, Cuba in 1964, Martínez Celaya relocated with his family to Spain at eight years old, and then to the US a few years later. An author who has published influential books and papers in art, poetry, and philosophy, and a former scientist, Martínez Celaya is the inventor of several patented laser devices. Works by the artist are held in public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Among many major solo shows and projects he has exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Berliner Philharmonie, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, among many others.

Additionally, Baldwin Gallery is very pleased to present our third show with camera artist Andres Serrano. To All That’s Been Forgotten. Famously, Serrano’s work first entered the popular public consciousness in the late 80s with the politicized condemnation of the inclusion of the work Immersion: Piss Christ in a show nominally funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. Perfunctorily deemed ‘obscene’, and a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity” by Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), the work became instantly symbolic of both right and reason to call for defunding of the NEA.

But, it is just as simple to view Serrano’s work as contextual to the sacristy of the arcane Paschal Mystery; Catholic reconciliation and mankind’s spiritual redemption hinges on the physical humanity manifested by the son of god said to walk among us: a human body and blood, weak, mortal, fallible, and thus uniquely capable to serve as the conduit covenant between the temporal and the divine. Raised in the Catholic church before the Second Vatican Council, Serrano’s universalizing of both human frailty and the capacity for redemption paradoxically seeks to bring the viewer to intimacy with the ‘common’ miracle of transubstantiation (and what author Flannery O’Connor called ‘the sweat and stink of the cross’): an exquisite restoration of mysteium fidei — humbling and ennobling, unknowable and revealed as exquisite beauty, in both doctrine and faith.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.