Many Sundays Spent Interpreting Pictures

The thing is, when he pays attention to the collaged and painted portions of some of the other works, Mar displays a nice flair for abstraction. Flouncy Flouncy and Stripes in My Hair dispatch the wigs to the edges of the image and come close to working. And if you ignore the wigs in Please Don't Stop the Music, its exotic collaged face is pure, good old-fashioned surrealism. As a whole, however, this project gets the Project Room off to a shaky start.

The subtropical environment clearly agreed with the artist, whose magnificent, monumental portrait of his late mentor, Leon Golub, was one of the highlights of the Miami Art Museum's 2006 "Big Juicy Paintings (and more)" exhibition. "The decision to leave Florida was not easy," he told me in an e-mail exchange. "The setting — the water, the sky, the heat — was good for me and for my work... My children learned about lizards, crabs and the ocean currents."

But when Martínez Celaya set out to buy and renovate an abandoned warehouse in Delray and later, as he put it, "tried to create a community of artists' studios," he ran into trouble with the city's zoning department. "It was a lousy experience to travel around the world giving lectures and then come to my town to get lectured about aesthetics from someone who thinks yellow and orange condos with porticos that go nowhere make for good taste."

Such frustrations ultimately got the best of him, although he leaves, he said, "with a great feeling about and affection towards Florida." He also leaves with some good connections. He has an exhibition at the Boca Museum in the works, and on November 1, he opens his latest cycle of work, "Nomad," at the Miami Art Museum. Based on the sneak preview I've had, it promises to be another winner.

A true Renaissance man — not just a painter and sculptor but also a philosopher, photographer, physicist, and poet — Martínez Celaya will be sorely missed.