The Fire of Heaven

The Fire of Heaven presents the work of world-renowned artist Enrique Martínez Celaya in conversation with the life and work of the influential twentieth-century California poet Robinson Jeffers. Despite existing in different lifetimes, Jeffers’s approach to life as art and his reverence for the natural beauty of the California coastline inextricably link the uncompromising poet to Martínez Celaya. The artist’s multi-faceted practice explores the map of a territory shaped by self, memory, ideations of home, exile, myth, and identity. His practice presumes art should be an ethical effort that aims to understand better and engage with the world and ourselves. Beyond these threads of commonality, Martínez Celaya draws directly from Jeffers’s writings, such as the 1928 poem The Summit Redwood, which serves as the exhibition’s namesake and describes “the fire from heaven” as a force untamed and ignited at whim. Martínez Celaya’s work created during his stay at the poet’s landmark home in Carmel-by-the-Sea is complemented by Jeffers’s handwritten poems, notes, and photographs.

ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA (*1964) was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He has realized exhibitions, interventions, and social and intellectual interactions worldwide with major museums, galleries, and institutions, including the Berliner Philharmonie, The State Hermitage Museum, and The Phillips Collection. A painter, sculptor, and writer, he lives in Los Angeles.