Detail of installation of Enrique Martinez Celaya at Snitzer Gallery.

Here’s an interesting turn of events: Fred Snitzer will now be representing Enrique Martinez Celaya. They were once neighbors in the heart of Wynwood: the sprawling, slate-gray Whale and Star studio and exhibition/lecture space of Martinez Celaya sat next to Snitzer’s gallery, which at one point last winter was going to relocate. Now Martinez Celaya is the one who has moved (though still in Wynwood), and his art will be represented in the Snitzer gallery as its Art Basel show.

“Burning as it were a lamp” has all the tell-tale marks of a Martinez Celaya work. The installation incorporates a bronze sculpture of a crying boy, mirrors covering three walls and imagery of the sea. The Cuba-born artist-exile often addresses issues of loss, as in a homeland but also of a childhood; of memory; and of contemplative reflection of the philosophical underpinnings of life. Martinez Celaya has a graduate degree in physics and is also a writer, so the various facets of these interests appear repeatedly in his work.

Since transplanting to Miami several years ago (his work is in major museums in the Americas and Europe), his work has been seen here in museum exhibitions, in collections, and on the street — another bronze sculpture of a struggling boy stands on Biscayne Boulevard near the Freedom Tower.

In “Burning,” he has included a painting of a mythical creature crashing into a turbulent sea — the reference to the dangerous passage so many from troubled island nations to the south have taken across the sea to get to these shores is there, as is the imagery of spirits based in Afro-Caribbean heritage. The burned creature could also be an angel literally fallen from grace. With the mirrors reflecting the painting, the bronze sculpture and the visitors themselves, identities become mixed. Who is arriving, leaving, crashing?

This is a departure for Snitzer, and part of a series of works from Martinez Celaya that will be shown around town during December.

“Burning as it were a lamp” opens on Nov. 23 and runs through Jan. 16 at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2249 N.W. 1st Pl., Miami; www.snitzer.com.