Quantum Man Mines The Chasm Between Art And Science
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday March 5, 2008
MORE than 40 years or so ago the author C.P.Snow stirred the pot with his "two cultures" idea. The kind of thinking required for science and the kind of thinking that produced a work of art, he suggested, were of two different orders. One was a matter of fact, discovery and argument, whose fundamental machinery was rationality; the other was about creation and intuition, producing ephemeral propositions of the imagination and fancy.
Snow's idea has been given a thrashing down the decades; yet its appeal as an explanatory construct lingers on in many an argument about the nature of art and what is or is not a scientific truth.What is intriguing about the work of visiting Cuban American artist Enrique Martinez Celaya showing at Liverpool Street Gallery is that he seems to have positioned it in that shimmering, volatile no man's land between Snow's two realms.Before his commitment to working full-time as an artist, Celaya studied physics at Cornell University, gaining a subsequent doctorate in quantum theory from the University of California. He was interested in that pointy end of science, where light is a wave and a particle simultaneously and "the uncertainty principle" the only proposition one could rely on with any certainty.Yet Celaya had also kept doing art classes, which he had been attending since he was a child. "I was interested in physics because I was interested in the nature of time," he says. "I discovered that there were questions I wanted to ask about the world that physics could not give me the answer to, and that I thought art perhaps could. Questions like the process of becoming, what does that mean in one's life ... My interest in physics and philosophy and art, they all connect in my mind."Celaya has assembled for his Sydney show seven large oil, wax and tar paintings and three sculptures to accompany them."The surface of a painting for me is like a battlefield," he says, "a battle between the paint, the image, the idea and the surface itself. I am not painting to create beauty or constructs or comments on culture ... It is through painting I attempt to sort these other things out, these questions. I stop the painting when the surface seems to be in equilibrium, but an equilibrium so fragile that if it goes just a little this way or toward that way, it will be destroyed."He seeks, he says, a painting whose equilibrium is "on the cusp, almost a bad painting"."A painting that sits in equilibrium, that is very stable, is usually called a great painting. That is not interesting to me. It is too comfortable. I like it to be on the edge. I like this fragility, this moment in time, before it becomes a good painting or a bad painting. "I want it on the edge that puts you always in a position of discomfort, unsure."Celaya's own uncertainty principle at work, you might say. Enrique Martinez Celaya's The Lovely Season is at Liverpool Street Gallery until March 27.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald