A Curtain That Waits, Enrique Martínez Celaya Paints a New Face for LA Opera
The Los Angeles artist hand-painted a 70-foot-wide curtain that will rise on Carmen when the company’s season opens October 17.
For the last 63 years, a starburst curtain greeted audiences at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. This season it is gone. In its place hangs The Things We Know, a curtain about 70 feet wide that Los Angeles artist Enrique Martínez Celaya painted by hand for LA Opera.
The image is spare and strange for an opera house. A pensive boy and girl stand beneath a halo of light, outlined in black on an off-white ground. The boy holds a caged bird, the girl a fish tank. The girl is the artist’s daughter Natalia, the Los Angeles Times reported, and the birds recall his grandfather, who kept a collection of them in cages.
“I wanted an image that would not be related to any opera,” Martínez Celaya said during a preview of the work in progress, according to the Times. Below the children waits another world, one that will not be seen until four minutes before conductor Domingo Hindoyan raises his baton and the curtain begins to rise. It shows the cosmos overlaid with blooming flowers and splintered prisms throwing rainbows. “A curtain is different from a painting on a wall because it has a life in time,” the artist said in LA Opera’s announcement, as reported by OperaWire.
Rather than print the image, Martínez Celaya and his team spent weeks painting it in acrylic and water-based paint on fabric spread across the stage floor. The idea began about 10 years ago, when LA Opera president and CEO Christopher Koelsch first saw the artist’s work at an L.A. Louver fundraiser. His only real request was a radically large-scale painting.
Born in Cuba, Martínez Celaya apprenticed with a painter at 12, earned a degree in applied physics from Cornell and a master’s in quantum electronics from UC Berkeley, then left a doctorate behind for art. He is a provost professor at USC, and his work sits in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and LACMA.
The curtain will hang for every mainstage performance this season, beginning with Hindoyan’s new production of Carmen, directed and designed by Thaddeus Strassberger and starring Rihab Chaieb and Joshua Guerrero. It opens Saturday, October 17, with a gala for the company’s 40th birthday, and runs through November 7. Koelsch told the Times he hopes to commission a new curtain for the 2027-28 season.
