The In Between: Enrique Martínez Celaya's "The Sextant"

Historia. History, the story, the foundation upon which our life is built, is preserved in the heart of memory. As if surrounded by a thin halo, it is protected by the understanding that the present can alter the fragile remains of what we hold onto. For Enrique Martínez Celaya, his story is covered in sugar. He is not chasing the sweetness of youth but excavating his past from a home that existed in a transitory place, buried under a mound of precarious crystal particles. The final punctuation in a trilogy that was never intended. Cuba has a way of demanding return.

The Sextant, currently on view at the Wende Museum, is the last work in a trilogy that Enrique Martínez Celaya never set out to create. It began in 2024 with Los muertos llaman al alba at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. The very act of returning to the island, soil mixed with turmoil and tension for the Celaya family, and continuing with The Word-Shimmering Sea: Diego Velázquez / Enrique Martínez Celaya at The Hispanic Society in New York. Three exhibitions across three institutions, tracing an arc the artist did not plan and could not have predicted. That it arrives at the Wende, a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cold War, feels less like a coincidence than an inevitability.

The largest work he has ever created is also the most autobiographical. By rebuilding his childhood home in Nueva Paz, Cuba, Martínez Celaya not only returns to his past but puts himself in his father’s shoes. Retracing the steps of an ambitious young man who set out to build a home for his family at the age of 17, a visionary who imagined the only Modernist home in the neighborhood, in the entire town, for that matter. Its materials were purchased through wages as an employee of the local sugar cane factory. Piece by piece, the project took many years to create. A labor of love built between 1957 and 1963, during the height of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and the embargo. The history of the Martínez Celaya family collides with Cuba’s turmoil. A place that, when seen on a map, appears as a perfect grid, a manufactured destination designed solely for the production of sugar cane. The house built with sugar was anything but sweet. It was a waiting room for the Martínez Celaya family as they awaited their exit from Cuba to Spain. While the home does in fact exist on a map, it exists between oceans, wrestling with the fondness of home.

On the wall, a painting titled The Vigil of Extinguished Stars, shows a figure bearing the weight of celestial bodies, the promise of the universe, and the defeat of dragging a fallen star, holding kite strings that extend from his back like flesh, his hunched shoulders pushing him forward and dragging a piece of the world behind him. Above it, a perfect grid, the aerial view of the town where Martínez Celaya grew up. A town built by sugar, built for sugar. And today the sugar cane factory is closed. No sugar is produced on Cuban soil. Cuba imports it. The Sextant is evidence of existence. Channeled through transcendence, catharsis, and the return to the place that quite literally suffocated the artist as a young boy, as he battled severe asthma and confronted death while waiting for the exit.

Where do we call home when we can’t find our North Star?

While the origins of Martínez Celaya’s work have always been deeply personal, he maintains a careful balance in his practice, raising the visceral questions of belonging, identity, borders, and agency without revealing too much of his story. He speaks from the heart and with sincerity, whilst resisting too many details. He wants his viewers to step into his work, so he masterfully refrains from saying too much. It is that which remains unspoken that echoes.

We stood with Martínez Celaya at the threshold between worlds, while densely packed sugar crunched beneath our feet. We can only view The Sextant from the outside. Peering through the window slats, we spoke, observing the one-to-one scale home from every vantage point.

A. Moret: The Sextant is part of a trilogy that was never intended, and yet here we are. What was it that Cuba kept asking of you?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “I felt I had to actually do something about Cuba itself, about the experience of Cuba. And I had the idea for about eight years. I thought it was something I should do, but not in just a regular art museum. The idea of building it had been circling in my head this whole time, and then when these two shows happened, it seemed like the inevitable final exhibition. Concluding the spirit, and because it was a sugar town, and because my interest was in this coating over time that had taken all those memories and all those events to sit almost under the silt of history, using sugar as a metaphor for that deposit, that kind of obscures and changes everything that happened.”

A. Moret: The home your father built was constructed during one of the most turbulent periods in Cuban history. How does that historical context live inside the work?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “The original house that this is based on was built between 1957 and 1963, which is the height of the Cold War. And Cuba was at the center of the Cuban Revolution, the embargo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Bay of Pigs. All of that happened in that period where my father built this house.”

A. Moret: The Sextant is a precision instrument for finding your position between two visible points. What guided you to this title?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “The idea of calling it “The Sextant” is that I’m making a suggestion that, in some ways, everything that happened in this house has functioned as a sextant that I will use to navigate my life. That’s why it’s called that. And then what I have done is try to create an experience here that even for a visitor who comes in without any references, who may not be able to necessarily deconstruct all the elements, they nonetheless get a sense of what might be happening here.”

Immediately upon entering the exhibition, we feel the weight of time. Martínez Celaya points to the horse in the foreground of the home. “Here you’re confronted, when you come in, with this horse pulling what is not obviously, at first, a sleigh. But it’s not obvious that those are lungs, but those are lungs, and you can see the vessels going through the horse. The horse has this pad as children’s toys do, and that comes directly from the reference to a sleigh. This is the reason why this piece is the one that receives you. This pile of sugar becomes like an hourglass dropping down.”

The horse receives you. It is made entirely of sugar and water, no armature of stone or bronze, no permanent material beneath, just the same substance that built the town of Nueva Paz, that ran through the refinery where Martínez Celaya’s father worked, that filled the air of a childhood home until breathing became impossible. This suffocation is rooted in a severe pulmonary affliction that the artist suffered as a young child, who was between the ages of five and six years old when they moved into the house. He points to the lungs carried by the horse and states, “Partly, it’s a suffocation of all the sugar coating the breathing, but it’s also, I was very asthmatic when I lived in this house, and I was near death a couple of times in these rooms. So I lived here with my brother and my mom after my father left. So the asthma and that sense of suffocation, which then mirrors what the sugar is doing to the house itself.”

From its flank, two arteries, one blue and one pink, the only color present in the entire sculpture, trace a contorted cord, an umbilical line connecting the animal to what it carries: a pair of lungs, their form emerging slowly from a mound of white. Sugar and water, holding the shape of breath. Extending across the vertical plane, a conveyor belt rises from the mound, constructed of steel and accentuated by oxidation, its rust and salvaged joints replicated but not made perfect. A precarious piece of homemade machinery, improvised and exposed, mechanizing the very construction of the house it feeds. It creaks and whirs like a workhorse, the sound of effort made audible, the contraption straining to make the construction possible. The sleigh too rests on its own small pad, the same humble oval base found beneath a child’s figurine. Horse and sleigh, each anchored by the same modest disc, placed like toys, reconstructed to the scale of a life. Sweetness is suffocation. And yet something in this arrangement insists on survival, on the small and ordinary things that keep the monumental upright.

Around the perimeter of the house, enlarged black-and-white line drawings are placed beneath the windows. They are recovered from letters that a young Martínez Celaya sent to his father, who had arrived in Spain two and a half years before his family. A child awaiting his own exit, recording the world around him, military aircraft, the SOS signal, the evidence of a Cuba in turmoil. In revisiting these letters, Martínez Celaya interacts with his younger self, existing in two places at once. Now a father himself, he tries to imagine how his own parents managed to create a family and build a life despite its imperfections. The recovered drawings are an act of retrieval, of tenderness, of reckoning. There is no front door. Only windows. Three of them, offering imperfect and incomplete views of what lies within. We are denied access. We can only piece together fragments as we adjust our vision through the window shades, deeply covered in sugar.

A. Moret: You described sugar as a deposit that obscures and changes everything that happened. How does a material that is so fragile become the language of something so permanent?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “For most of the time in this house, we were just waiting. It was a waiting room for our exit. My father had his exit first, and then we came after. So the entire time, this house functioned for us as a place that was neither Cuba anymore, nor Spain yet. It was the in between.”

A. Moret: There is no front door. Only windows. What does it mean to build a home that we cannot enter?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “Originally, I was going to let people walk into the house, but then I felt that rejection, that denial, is in keeping with, conceptually, the way I understand this house now to exist in a place that can no longer be reached. The idea is that you have to assemble all these things. They are not offered at the same time. You are denied. You can only make sense of this house by multiple looks, and adding them together.”

To understand The Sextant, one must first understand the artist’s studio- a meticulous space where each room is dedicated to a separate discipline- painting, drawing, writing, and reading, each with its own atmosphere and purpose. A studio uniform worn with the same quiet conviction as a declaration. Recycled cans repurposed as vessels for brushes, resourcefulness elevated to philosophy. Everything has a place, and everything is in its place. It is the space of a man who knows precisely where he stands. And it is impossible not to read it as a response to a childhood spent in a house that was neither Cuba nor Spain yet. The studio is what you build when you finally get to choose.

A. Moret: Your studio reflects a fierce intentionality, every room with a purpose, every tool in its place. Is that a response to a childhood where space was never your own?

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “I haven’t thought about that. I have thought about my preoccupation with space and the idea of my dad building space. What you’re asking is an important question. There is no space for privacy when you look at the size and realize there is no sense of yourself, and where your boundary is has always been determined by somebody else. So what you are describing of my way of working is about trying to establish those boundaries. I am certainly, of my brothers, the one most preoccupied with space and how it is crafted. They are much more passive about that. This house had a big influence on me. I was the oldest. My youngest brother never lived here.”

There were no formal architectural plans. To rebuild the home, Martínez Celaya had to return. He traveled to Nueva Paz, walked the perimeter, stood inside what remained, and photographed everything. In the absence of blueprints, he used the only reliable instrument at his disposal: his own body.

A. Moret: There is a unique physicality inherent to The Sextant. 

Enrique Martínez Celaya: “The project started as an intellectual, conceptual project, and very quickly became physical, emotional, and spiritual. First of all, the scale of the house. Look at our size compared to it. It seems tiny. It’s hard to believe that a family lived here. That in itself gives you a lot of emotional information about how to live here. Also, the sense of abandonment. This house has been abandoned to sugar. But in some ways, our house is abandoned to time. There is no way to check on it. When I went to do the show in Cuba, I traveled to the house, and that is how I was able to rebuild it. I took pictures around the house. I used my size. This house is built around my size as the unit of measurement. For me, it was a true transcendent experience, more than perhaps any other work.”

The suffocation was not only metaphorical. As a young child growing up in the house, Martínez Celaya had severe asthma, confronting death more than once within those walls. In many ways, his was a Proustian existence, the senses so acutely tied to place that the past was never truly past. The smell of sugar, the weight of the air, the particular quality of light through those windows, all of it coded into the body, inseparable from memory. It was his aunt, a doctor, who intervened. From a family of physicians, she enrolled her nephew in a clinical trial developed in Russia, during which 101 vaccines were administered over the final days of his time in Cuba, accompanied by exercises to complete at home. The treatment became its own kind of countdown. One hundred and one days. And then the exit. After leaving Cuba, Martínez Celaya never had asthma again. What prompted the change remains uncertain. Was it the climate? The clinical trial? The sugar? Perhaps the body, like the house, needed to be somewhere else.

The original house in Nueva Paz still stands. The Martínez Celaya family was the only one ever to inhabit its walls. Today, it is a historical site, repurposed as a library of wedding registries. Where a family once waited for their exit, strangers now record their beginnings. What was once a bedroom is lined floor to ceiling with shelves of registry books, the documentation of other lives, other unions, other promises. “There is something mausoleum-like about it,” he observes.

A place that was never truly vacated, never truly lived in after they left, now filled not with memory but with the paperwork of futures. The house that existed between the oceans, wrestling with the fondness for home, now keeps the records of those who have found theirs.

The house that sugar built leaves a bittersweet imprint in the heart of memory, time, and the self.

The Sextant is on view at the Wende Museum in Culver City through October 2026.

 

All photographs by Rainer Hosch for Installation Magazine, 2026