When the curtain rises on LA Opera’s new season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion later this month, it won’t be the usual starburst pattern that has greeted fans for the past 63 years. That curtain was replaced with something entirely new: a design titled “Things We Know,” featuring a boy and girl looking pensive under a halo of light. The boy is holding a caged bird; girl in an aquarium. Both are framed in black on an off-white background.
The 70-foot-wide screen, meticulously created by Los Angeles artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, is a surprising choice for a major opera house where a storytelling pattern or image is expected. A bold and extraordinary move, this work draws on the concepts of art and the place of art in the human soul.
“I wanted an image that had nothing to do with any opera,” Martínez Celaya said during a preview of the act, which was still in the works. “I’m interested in both the coming-of-age aspects of these children and the control of these birds and these fish and this control of the children.”
Martínez Celaya added that he was particularly intrigued by the gray zone, “where childhood has ended and adulthood has not yet arrived.”
Another world is depicted under the children; a world that will not be seen until four minutes before conductor Domingo Hindoyan raises his baton and the curtain begins to rise. Its opening will reveal a view of the cosmos covered in blooming flowers and shattered prisms scattering rainbows.
Artist Enrique Martínez Celaya was commissioned to create a unique work of art as the new act for the LA Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)
“The limitation here then breaks open,” Martínez Celaya said. “What you’re going to encounter here is actually the performative aspect of it. But as you move up, you’re trying to hold on to what’s lost, and you can’t have both at the same time. So this trade-off makes the movement of the curtain fundamental to the experience.”
Discussion of collaborating on a project between Martínez Celaya and LA Opera Chief Executive Christopher Koelsch began nearly 10 years ago, after Koelsch first encountered Martínez Celaya’s work at an LA Louver fundraiser.
“It was very clear from that conversation that he was someone who thought quite deeply about music and also about how to convey that through art in public spaces,” Koelsch said of their first conversation.
Koelsch, who had long sought to democratize opera, invited Martínez Celaya to Chandler for a review. “The idea of doing a really large public art project and using the theater itself as a gallery/canvas was an idea I always had,” Koelsch said. “For many years, I have been trying to find a way to triangulate the commercial interests of the for-profit world and the nonprofit world by inviting artists into a regular dialogue with the company.”
Koelsch presented no real parameters to Martínez Celaya, stating only that he wanted a “radically large-scale painting.” The aim was to create something that is a symbol of the city, a work that would reflect the source of creativity in Los Angeles’ contemporary art world.
“All we wanted was for it not to be tied to any opera, to the image of any opera, but just a work of art that could stand on its own,” Martínez Celaya said. “And apart from that [L.A. Opera was] “She is incredibly generous and open.”
The upper half of the composition, which relates to Martínez Celaya’s family history, was exhibited on a small scale at the National Museum of Fine Arts in his native Cuba. The image depicts a period when his family went into exile from Havana to Spain. The girl is his daughter Natalia, and the birds are a reference to his grandfather, who kept a collection as pets in cages.
A detail from the new act prepared by Martínez Celaya for the LA Opera. The little boy is based on his grandfather.
(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)
Martínez Celaya began apprenticing with a painter when he was 12 years old—the beginning of his formal art education—and around the same time he began to develop his interests in writing and philosophy. He earned a degree in applied physics with a minor in electrical engineering from Cornell University and then a master’s degree in quantum electronics from UC Berkeley. While pursuing her doctorate, she changed direction and turned to art and completed her master’s degree in fine arts at UC Santa Barbara. Today, he serves as a provocateur in the humanities and arts at USC.
Rather than printing the artwork on the screen, Martínez Celaya and his team spent the last few weeks hand-painting it on canvas-like fabric on the stage floor. The original studio canvas was painted with oil paint but the curtain was painted with acrylic and water-based paint. Changes from one medium to another are part of the process, and Martínez Celaya said he finds it both exciting and challenging.
The new act is not the artist’s first brush with classical music. In 2004, he created a sculptural installation for the Berlin Philharmonic called “Schneebett” (Snowbed), a somber, multi-layered environment inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven’s last days in Vienna in 1827. A metal bed with a cooling system was placed in its center, which created a continuous layer of ice on its surface. There were also writings made of tar, oil and feathers and a large forest painting. The piece is currently in the collection of Miami Pérez Art Museum.
“Leaving dozens of people trapped in a room, having to engage with something, is a very different experience than having people walk past that room in a museum for seven seconds,” Martínez Celaya said, explaining the genesis of the new screen. “Most people come there not for the curtain, but for what’s behind the curtain. So how do you create a situation where that becomes an end in itself?”
A view from the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya is working on painting the new curtain he created for the LA Opera.
(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)
Martínez Celaya started the process simply enough: He picked up the pen to organize his thoughts and started asking general questions like what the scene is, what people are doing here, what Los Angeles is and what are people expecting, are they bored, are they talking, and so on.
“All this was in my mind before I started working. For me, this had to be a research,” said the artist, noting that it took at least six weeks for him to start drawing. Early images featured a silhouetted figure inspecting scattered human limbs, with the bottom of the composition bathed in sea foam. In the next iteration, the sea foam was replaced by prismatic and floral elements.
LA Opera had originally planned to carefully disassemble the act at the end of the season and sell some parts to raise money, but that idea is quickly changing.
“I want to find a way to preserve the legible parts one way or another,” said Koelsch, who hopes to have a new screen made for the 2027-28 season. “Frankly, after all this effort and investment, I think we are incentivized to preserve some of this. The fact that this has happened will create new opportunities for this to happen again in the future.”