Celis' art demonstrates a grand and unbroken continuity from his work of the 1960s in Buenos Aires through his explorations in South and Central America, to Paris and then to New York in the 1990s. He has lived through several generations of styles and has distilled his own artistic language from his study and observations of many artistic movements including the seminal early twentieth-century art of French Cubism, to mid-century Abstract Expressionism and even the irony-laden theoretically driven expressionism of the past two decades.
....

Celis has always insisted that an artist must be of his own time and his own people. "Su propio tiempo" is a phrase he has written and repeated often in his published statements. In this respect, the artist demonstrates the great continuity that is even now evolving between the various countries of the Americas. It is indeed obvious that we are linked geographically in a continuous piece of land running from Canada to the tip of South America. Barriers of language and custom have kept us apart for many centuries but they are melting with great rapidity as our people become bilingual and our cuisine intermingle and many of us have spent significant periods of time living and around in one another's culture.
....

Indeed, his art is Whitman in so many ways. These two poets, one literary and one visual, separated by time and space, would surely agree with Whitman's observation in Song of the Open Road: "I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell."