Suzanne Caporael | Whitehot Magazine

https://www.milesmcenery.com/news/suzanne-caporael-whitehot-magazine2

Exhibition Review by Jonathan Goodman

The mostly abstract painter Suzanne Caporael’s eighth show at Miles McEnery offers an excellent exposure to her direct, but not simple, nonobjective lyricism, often linked to nature.  Her work consists of images and patterns that sometimes lean in the direction of feasible recognition, but, generally, the paintings enact schemes that are delightful in their own right, without being accessible in a realist sense. Sharply individuated from each other, the works also enact, in the show, an unusual cohesiveness, in which the particulars of one painting will resonate across the gallery space to another. Thus, a conversation, based not on likeness but related difference, moves into the thought of Caporael’s audience, as viewers contemplate art that thrives mostly on an abstract framework, albeit one that recognizes natural sources (the artist currently lives in upstate New York). The simplicity of her painted elements lends itself to a reading of the work in which design dominates. It is very difficult to tie the arrangements in her compositions to actualities in life, but the history of abstraction in American art allows her to consistently suggest rather than declare. This freedom is key to our enjoyment of her art. 

For this writer, one of the most elegant and beautiful works is 759 (specimen) (2020), in which a light, flower-like, four-petaled image exists is the middle of a black design--a solid mass with small V-shaped cutouts on top and the sides. One half of the central image, which can be likened to a cutout by Matisse, is colored a pale blue on the left and has a tall black rectangle backing its right half.  The word “specimen” suggests that this is indeed a flower found and picked in the fields; it cannot be said that Caporael’s art is completely abstract. But the forms are simplified to the point of losing any specificity that would identify them within nature. As a result the image’s possible natural origins are worked into a pattern indicative of painting and culture--this may be a good way of describing the artist’s method in general. The painting 749 mask (blow me a kiss) (2020) is a very simple design: a wedge of a black circle, within which is an oval space. Next to this black design is an orange oval whose size fits the open space in the black image. The background is a neutral tan. One hesitates to read so open-ended a pattern as anything but abstract, but then that is its strength. The design is comely in the extreme. 

The overall pattern of 754 (Eden) (2020) is geometric: a black stripe with greater thicknesses in the middle (every other turn of the stripe) filling the green background as it moves across and down the field of the composition. Why would the artist call the image “Eden”? The picture seems entirely nonobjective. There are times when the personal meaning of a work of art eludes the conscious vision of the painter’s audience, and here this is likely the case. The image itself may come from another, perhaps earlier or indigenous culture, or it may simply be made up. But the strength of the abstraction cannot be denied. Once again, Caporael seems to be alluding to realities beyond the efflorescence of the image, a key to the work’s attractiveness. In 748 (the beggar’s cup) (2020), an grayish-tan cup is in fact visible in the crossed dark-gray stripes of a grid, painted by hand. Why such a choice of subject matter?  The answer cannot be found.

I am not suggesting Caporael is a deliberately mysterious painter, only that there is a hidden allusiveness that seems to result from forms that may be interpreted a number of ways. Even though we usually cannot connect the image to something recognizable, we never feel far from the notion that some kind of realism lies behind the abstraction. This is interesting in the extreme. Meaning in abstraction usually is elucidated by a close reading of forms rather than attention being paid to the subject matter, which remains outside our knowledge. But sometimes Caporael gives us more than a hint in the titles of her works. Thus, we can align with the deliberate content indicated by the artist. Still, nothing is clearly defined; her painterly schemes remain more than slightly enigmatic. But then that is the reason for their lasting effectiveness; they belong not only to a language of their own but to an idiom we might recognize. It must be said that the results are highly accomplished. WM

AWARDED GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to congratulate Suzanne Caporael as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

On April 8, 2020, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists. 2020 Fellows are drawn from 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 78 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces.

Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Known: Unknown | The New York Studio School

29 October - 02 December, 2018

The New York Studio School presents Known: Unknown, an exhibition that brings together power players of painting today and emerging creators of tomorrow. We invited a select group of prominent artists to participate in this exhibition, with an added twist—each invited artist chose one emerging or lesser known artist to also be included in the show.

Whether teacher and student, friends and colleagues, mentor and mentee, each artist pair has an aesthetic connection. The abridged circular forms connected by a white path in Suzanne Caporael’s painting are echoed in her chosen artist Rita MacDonald’s optical white polka dot wall drawing. Nanette Carter’s work, comprised of shaped layers of painted mylar, and the work of her invited artist Heloisa Pomfret, a fan shaped canvas with coral-like depth, both demonstrate edges full of surprise and color with natural warmth. Lisa Corinne Davis’s complex melted grid and Madhini Nirmal’s chaotic scene present picture planes dense with details and stacked, collapsing structures. Louise Fishman’s canvas is dominated by thick paint applied in big moves touching every edge, and Margery Mellman’s piece has a similar all over attention, although a thinner veil of paint saturates the surface, with hints of imagery pulled out by delicate marks.

The rainfall rhythm of Carrie Moyer’s painting plays nicely with the pulsating intestinal maze of Theresa Daddezio’s, both built of natural forms and patterns made to feel completely unnatural. Dorothea Rockburne’s Light in Geometry II and Eva LeWitt’s installation feature geometric, repeating forms that radiate color and light. Joan Snyder’s painting SHE, a tumble of thick pink and purple marks cumulating in a massive figure, pairs with a Cate White painting full of layers of imagery, with echoes of Snyder’s pink, reds, and pale grays.

The works in this exhibition, curated by Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert, have a sensation of discovery. Forms overlap, peeking out between both opaque and transparent boundaries, stay hidden, or reveal themselves through washes and layers. In each work, and across the exhibition, shapes and movements repeat, but never as duplicates—each artist’s hand is felt in the marks.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Suzanne Caporael
Nanette Carter
Lisa Corinne Davis
Louise Fishman
Carrie Moyer
Dorothea Rockburne
Joan Snyder Rita MacDonald
Heloisa Pomfret
Madhini Nirmal
Margery Mellman
Theresa Daddezio
Eva LeWitt
Cate White

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WHAT FOLLOWS HERE

www.amy-nyc.com

23 March - 22 April 2017

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Suzanne Caporael. What Follows Here will open on 23 March and remain on view through 22 April 2017. A public reception for the artist will be held on Thursday 23 March from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Carter Ratcliff.

For almost three decades, Suzanne Caporael has created spare but evocative paintings inspired by the natural world and the human desire to control it. In these palimpsest landscapes, she employs a minimalist aesthetic as the language of suggestion. The allusive shapes occupy quietly contradictory spatial realms, and—as with words in poetry—we encounter shifts in meaning. The richness of color and composition belie the problematic contradiction inherent in a deep love of place also haunted by an underlying narrative of loss.

The paintings’ titles, implicit rather than descriptive, reveal an engagement with such questions. The large, cool blue- infused 719 (D. Balmori island) pays rapturous homage to the recently deceased architect Diana Balmori and her work on phytoremediation (the treatment of environmental problems through the use of plants). 720 (read the spill), with its seven-foot expanse of red, was inspired by the artist’s friend (a NASA scientist) and his daily updates on his exploration of an oil leak that has persisted for over twelve years.

Naturalists say that the purpose of beauty is to call attention to its subject. Caporael concurs, and as a painter since early childhood, she brings the forces of skill and mature intellect to the process. Concise and incisively rendered with simple lines and shapes, her work has been called astonishingly lush.

The subjective experience of attempting to hold one of these deliberately elusive paintings in an aesthetic embrace returns one to the notion of place—and of the painting as a repository of ideas. As Carter Ratcliff writes, Caporael “has invented a pictorial repertory that focuses the generalizing, synthesizing power of abstraction, not on metaphysical absolutes but on the shifting, enveloping world that we experience from moment to moment.”

As noted in The New York Times, “Caporael’s paintings are a curious mix of the aesthetic and the conceptual...the paintings are sensuous and lyrical as well as rigorously formal.” Caporael continues to create paintings that both display and invoke a discipline of thought.

SUZANNE CAPORAEL was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949, and has lived in twenty-five states. The artist earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. She had her first show at thirty-five, when then Director Paul Schimmel debuted her work at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). She was awarded a National Endowment grant in painting in 1986, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009 she was a guest artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The artist’s prints are published in collaboration with Tandem Press, Madison, WI.

Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.

Suzanne Caporael lives and works in Lakeville, CT with her husband, novelist, Bruce Murkoff.

Enough Is Plenty

www.amy-nyc.com

17 October - 23 November 2013

NEW YORK, NEW YORK –  AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to present a group of works by Suzanne Caporael, Enough is Plenty. These studies, small paintings and collages, are representative of Caporael’s continued interest in the integration of visual cues – shape, color, contrast – as the prerequisite of perception. The content of individual works ranges from a single visual cue to a multiplicity of cues.

Philosopher Alva Noë, in his preface to his book Action in Perception writes, “... perception is, I argue, a kind of thoughtful activity.” Caporael concurs, and through her work provides the impetus, while encouraging the viewer to take up the beholder’s share.

SUZANNE CAPORAEL was born in New York in 1949. The artist’s work derives from close observation of the natural world and the attempts, scientific and cultural, to define and control it. Observation coupled with research has resulted in groups of works related to trees, chemical elements, water, ice, time, and place memory. Her current area of interest is the hierarchy of perception – the way in which the brain processes visual cues to construct a reality.

The artist earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. She had her first show at thirty-five, when then director Paul Schimmel debuted her work at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). She was awarded a National Endowment Grant in Painting in 1986, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009, she was a guest artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.

The artist lives and works in Bangall, New York, with her husband, novelist Bruce Murkoff.

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Seeing Things

www.amy-nyc.com

15 November–22 December 2012

A few years ago, Suzanne Caporael hit a patch of ice while driving on a rural road. As the car raced down a steep hill, she “saw” the landscape slowly dragged across her vision – as though her eyes were trying to hold her in place while the car continued its slide. The memory of that visual anomaly led her through a thicket of books and essays on the subject of visual cognition. Neuroscientists, magicians, artists and art historians, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists and evolutionary biologists, have all contributed to the literature on the eye—brain connection.

The eye is device, the brain interprets. Vision has its own peculiar language of cues, some straightforward and some more subtle. In her new paintings, Caporael grapples with these cues, and with the way in which time and cultural reference affect how we see what we see.

From the visceral to the deeply conceptual, the paintings present challenges to recognition and preconceptions. Some, like 632 (Home Field, Witnessed) are minimally descriptive. Others construct and reveal methodology of optical illusions, and a pair of “Newton’s Buckets” address the conundrum of rendering the strictly mental image. In 622 (Pierrot After Watteau After Picasso After Gary Clarke), fully seeing requires specific prior knowledge and 624 (Youth with a Wooden Leg) presents a choice between conflicting realities. Included are Caporael’s paintings alluding to and celebrating other artists’ engagement with the discordance between seeing and knowing.

Exploring the different pathways to seeing has led Caporael to soften her formalistic practice, and the result is a full-blown stylistic disparity well suited to her subject. The paintings do not look alike. Each is endowed with an honesty of purpose of its own. Confidently moving between the dynamic and the serene, Caporael reveals a flexibility and dexterity previously held at bay. The elegance remains, as does the scholastic rigor that has categorized each series in the artist’s 30-year career. 

Individually these paintings ask questions that beget more questions. Collectively, they invite the viewer to share the artist’s journey – to see ourselves seeing.

Suzanne Caporael was born in the United States in 1949. She earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.

The artist lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York with her husband, novelist Bruce Murkoff.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by noted poet, writer and critic John Yau.

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The Memory Store

www.amy-nyc.com

21 October - 4 December, 2010

New York, New York - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Caporael in this, her third exhibition based on a series of road trips through America. Suzanne Caporael: The Memory Store, opens on October 21st and will be on view until December 4th. A public reception will take place on Oct. 21, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The artist will be present.

Congruent with an ongoing study of visual cognition and recollection, Caporael has traveled over 30,000 miles of American roads in order to expose herself to the revelations and experiences of the United States, a country she refers to as “an impenetrable abstraction.” On the back roads, memorial plastic wreaths abound, as do barely disguised missile silos, and signs for “Neapolitan Mastiffs,” “Flemish Giants” and “New Yorkies” (dogs, rabbits and puppies, respectively). A virgin pastoral landscape can, at any turn, explode into the aggressive splendor of a string of strip malls. Horses stand idle in pastures, Indiansride ATVs, and statues of Mary cavort with Disney’s Seven Dwarfs on front lawns. Caporael’s interest lies in what we make of what we see.

In reference to a previous series of paintings, Time, (2004-2006) Caporael quoted physicist J.T. Fraser: “Space is the vessel of time.” But as we know, time robs memory of the details. In The Memory Store the painter presents us with the sensation of futility and the pleasure of the effort to hold on to recollections. The spare arrangements and unrepentant ambiguity imply a procedural distance with purpose. The occasional “recognizable” shape or line prompt contemplation, while the paintings physical contradictions between hard edges and the subtle erosions of boundaries encourage the reassembly of the elements to the viewers own memory store.

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