You left Cuba when you were seven. Did that have a big influence on your life and your art?
I’m going to give you two contradictory answers. On the one hand, of course. It was a sense of dislocation, and we went through, as many immigrants do, a lot of challenges in Spain and then Puerto Rico, and school fights and all that. In some ways, you always feel like an outsider as an exile. It gives you that position of being an outsider looking in at things. So yes, it changed me and affected me.
On the other hand, I was originally raised as a Catholic, and [internalized] many of the concerns of Catholicism and mortality. Even though I’m not a Catholic and not a practicing religious person anymore, certain concerns stay with me. And I think my natural personality, even when I was in Cuba, was not that different than it is today. So, a lot of the time, critics immediately read into my work, for example, loss, which is not all that is in my work. When they read that, they immediately say, “Oh, it’s because he was an exile,” as if an American who has always lived in Connecticut cannot feel loss. So those kinds of things I find are too quick of a reading on things.
Before becoming an artist, you graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University with a B.S. in Applied Physics and a minor in Electrical Engineering. You then went to UC Berkeley, where you earned a M.S. in quantum electronics. What drew you to science?
When I was a kid, my life was confusing. There were always new schools, new realities, new things to figure out. I felt that trying to understand what was happening was so fundamental, and I always felt that I was at a deficit. Probably all kids felt like this. But I think when you arrive in a new country, you especially feel like this.
I got interested in philosophy and science very early. I didn’t really understand much of the philosophy I read, but I read a lot of it. Part of the reason I did is because I was trying to understand ‘what is this world?’ and ‘who am I?’ Science did two things for me, which really helped me. One was to give me an understanding of the world that I was able to grasp at the same time that it told me about the immensity of things.
Science has a fantastic way of making you feel that there’s a bigness, the kind of magnitude and vastness of what you’re dealing with, not just in terms of size, but in terms of there’s so much to know. Also, it made me feel ‘cleaner’, and that I could put aside some of the craziness that comes with being in exile. Philosophy, in some ways, keeps you in your messiness.
You said you convinced yourself to leave science for art after five days walking on the coast and writing at Pigeon Point Lighthouse. How did that happen?
There were two forces that convinced me. One was this is the time to do it. If I don’t do it now, I would never do it when I have family or something, right? The very practical things.
The second thing that convinced me was I have worked very hard as a physicist. I’m disciplined and hardworking, and I am not going to just sit around with a beret. I am actually going to be doing something about it. I might not succeed, but it’s not going to be because I’m just going to be pretending to do something. That ultimately convinced me. In some ways, all of us, at some moment in life, we come to ourselves in some manner.
Today, your work is exhibited in museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The State Hermitage Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. What did you take from your career in science into being an artist?
I think to be a physicist, you have to have certain discipline and you have a desire for truth and a willingness to question your own assumptions. So I think I brought that to art. Then I was able to also bring to art things that I felt like I had to leave out in physics. There were parts of my life that felt too messy or too poetic, I think, to bring into the lab, and it always felt like a burden. I think in some ways, there’s a tendency sometimes in science to not want to let anything distort your reasoning, or lay some veil over information. But the veil is interesting.
We tend to think of science as a triumphant accomplishment. But we tend to think of art as something that we feel insecure about, its value. When you look at the university, you see in the humanities and the arts quite a lot of insecurity. And I think quite often, many people in the arts feel compelled to show their intelligence or to show that they really know, or whatever. And to me, one of the wonderful things about having left physics is that I already knew there was value for me in art. I didn’t feel the need to prove anything.
Tell us about your time at Berkeley.
Berkeley was so profound for me. Those years, from 1986 to 1990, were the years that made me who I am today, not just as an artist, but in some ways, as a thinker and gave me an understanding of how to be in the world. That’s where I learned about Czeslaw Milosz, who had been a professor there. And from Milosz, I learned about Robinson Jeffers, the poet from Carmel, who became very important to me. So many parts of what became my artistic and emotional universe happened there, and I had a fantastic time riding my bicycle around. So, I have just a great sense of affection and gratitude for those four years that I was there.
Martínez Celaya’s show, The Wilderness, will be on view at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco through May 10, 2025.
