It is exactly twenty years since Cuban-born Enrique Martínez Celaya first came to Berlin. The visit left a last­ing mark on his work: afterwards, the artist began cre­at­ing his first envi­ron­ments, where paint­ings, sculp­tures and objects meet and enter into a spa­tial inter­ac­tion with the viewer.

One of these envi­ron­ments was on dis­play in the Berliner Philharmonie around the New Year of 2005. In front of a pastose paint­ing of a snow-cov­ered for­est stood a bed in a snow-white cov­er­ing. This was not linen, how­ever, but a thick layer of ice in the form of a blan­ket and pil­low. Using sophis­ticated refrig­er­a­tion technol­ogy, the artist had turned the snow bed, the symbol of death in Paul Celan’s poem Schnee­bett, into a real­ity. It visu­al­ized the final years of Ludwig van Beethoven, when he was confined to his sick bed. Taking the famous com­poser as its point of depar­ture, the work picked up a whole number of sig­nif­icant themes in the history of Ger­man cul­ture, such as the for­est as a projec­tion screen for national identity and intel­lectual stim­u­la­tion, and the yearn­ing for tranquil­ity in indus­tri­al­ized soci­ety. Along­side these themes, the work addressed funda­mental dis­course on human alien­ation from nature, col­lec­tive cultural mem­ory, and transience. This group of motifs plunges us into the Ger­man Romanticism her­alded by Beethoven’s music, which was to influ­ence Martínez Celaya in many ways.

Martínez Celaya’s lat­est paint­ings are like­wise related in part to the motifs and aes­thetic program of the Ger­man Romantics. In the last few months, he has produced sev­eral large-format landscapes, and these now take center-stage in his first solo show at Galerie Judin in Berlin—evoking long­ings, mys­tical expe­r­i­ence, nat­u­ral phe­nom­ena, and indi­vid­ual emo­tion. They show, for exam­ple, snowy fields rutted by dark streams (The Spellbound), brightly col­ored jew­els glit­ter­ing in the mud of a riverbank (The One Who Stayed (Milk)), or a tree defying the surf with golden branches (The Prophet). All these works are informed by an unspec­i­fied time and place, and by the pres­ence or absence of human pro­tag­o­nists. In fact, there is only one human fig­ure in these paint­ings which is unusual for the artist: The Fiery Wounddepicts a boy whose body seems to have been shaped from cold lava. Yet there is another one: As a narrator and a fig­ure of identi­fica­tion, the artist offers the viewer a curi­ous wan­derer who is to be found in the seven water­col­ors of the se­ries The Con­science. This motif also has a rela­tion­ship to the picto­rial tra­di­tions of the Romantics, where the wan­derer per­son­i­fies the desire for unspoiled nature, and the long­ing for home or dis­tant places.

The pres­ence of these rare fig­ures alerts our con­scious­ness to the absence of people in the other works. In these com­po­si­tions, it is the space that exerts agency. The sett­ings and states which the artist reveals to us in large format now pose all the more rid­dles: Who can enjoy the edifying view of the snow-capped mountain from this woo­den hut—and also be overwhelmed by its unattain­abil­ity (The War­den)?Who low­ered the cof­fin into the water—and who is buried here (The Blos­som)? And what vehicle left those traces on the snowy track through the field (The Mirror)? Blanks like these gen­er­ate an exc­it­ing rela­tion­ship between the work and the viewer, because while the picto­rial narra­tions resist cog­ni­tive access, they sug­gest indi­vid­ual projec­tions and incip­i­ent expla­na­tions.

The principle of blanks to chal­lenge us per­me­ates all of Martínez Celaya’s work. A few years ago, he described this in his own words: “Art is as much about what is not there as about what is there. The great­ness of a work of art depends more in what it holds back than in what it shows.”