SUZANNE CAPORAEL

S u zan n e Caporae l

T h e La n d sca p e

S u z a nn e Caporae l

T h e L a n d sc a p e

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel (212) 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

M e m o r y, l a n d sc a p e ,

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I nve ntio n

L i l ly W e i

Suzanne Caporael views the world obliquely, dialectically, subjectively. Her work shows the outward traces of what she calls a “rambling mind,” one that continually notes—and annotates—her surroundings. Out of what she sees and how she processes her personal, often idiosyncratic, accumulation of data, Caporael conjures up images that are figurative and abstract, factual and poetically reimagined, incisively depicted with simple lines and brushstrokes and also astonishingly lush.

She compensates for what she withholds in detailed, descriptive imagery with a lavish use of paint, her simplicity never austere.

Caporael’s newest paintings, like many of her previous works, are landscapes.

They are her great recurrent theme, the heart of her endeavor, from the rivers, lakes and fields near her home in upstate New York to the more remote landscapes that she has explored throughout years of extensive traveling. She attentively scans and quietly appraises what is before her, her belief system anchored in the actuality of the land more than its mythos. Yet mythos is present; she has more than a passing kinship with the New England transcendentalists.

For Caporael, it is a matter of seeing “with intent.” She conducts an inquiry into what constitutes landscape and explores how to make that inquiry both more precise and more expansive, interweaving landscape’s many categorizations. Is it geography, architecture, engineering? Is it environmental or ecological studies? Is it art history, literature, media, sociology, anthropology or political science? Is it memory or reverie? Is it all of these and more?

Her most recent project evolved from reading about ways of seeing—through “eye, brain, history, memory, social constructs.” In a reaction of sorts, she pulled her “head up out of the books to look around” even more closely at our “manipulated surroundings.” That, however, just sent her running back to books, in particular to John R. Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America (1983), a far-ranging study of preindustrial America from the late-16th century to the mid-19th century and how land during that time was largely shaped by traditional practices and communal knowledge. It’s a book (as well as a writer) that she cites often, one that has been seminal in her conceptual development, redefining the term “landscape” for her. From Common Landscape, she learned that landscape is not simply a view and is not synonymous with nature.

“Wilderness is nature; landscape is not, and it is landscape that now dominates what most of us see,” she said. Roads, which she considers routes of escape into nature, appear regularly in her paintings, but roads, she also observed, alter nature.

698 (Proximate cause, 2), 2014, and 688 (Proximate cause), 2014, are two depictions of altered nature. The latter, a stunning painting that is the most abstract in this group, is divided into three sections: a wedge of rich olive that seems slightly peeled back in its upper right hand corner; a mid-section of creamy white marked by two faint almost parallel lines that peter out, suggesting perhaps a road to nowhere; and a bottom wedge of ravishing indigo black.

In her investigations, Caporael touches on industrial agriculture, on what she describes as the evolution of our landscape of necessity—of farms and fields—into a

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globalized system of production and distribution, into Big Ag. 689 (Coharie sow farm, N.C.), 2014, refers to how we grow and slaughter animals for food, but the hog sheds are just a few barely noticeable rectangular dashes in the far distance; the viewer is distracted by the great expanse of yellow-dappled turquoise green that so bewitchingly conjures sunlit water. And there is a field of Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa in 701 (Proprietary alfalfa), 2014, which consists of row upon row of receding, softened, slanted lines in two unlikely shades of green. Her palette of denatured hues reminds us that her images are first and foremost paintings, from their tremulous lines—seen when closely observed—to their painterly brushwork, to pictures that aren’t flush to the edges of the support, all quietly proclaiming their illusionary nature. Ecological matters that are irrevocably altering the Earth and our collective future are addressed elliptically, another aspect of her paintings’ multilayered narratives and aesthetics. Caporael conceals and reveals. It’s all there, but pared down. Her work speaks softly, while carrying a big stick.

Landscape is not something Caporael slavishly reproduces; she thinks of it as a “medium,” as the theorist W.J.T. Mitchell called it. It can also be constructed, invented from a glimpse and recollected, as in her painting 692 (At Jullo Callo, landscape after Darger), 2014, or in the vast hayfield in 702 (Ride along; Wing Rd.), 2014, that she says she drives by every day but is really painting from memory, passing on “misinformation” when she does so—which might also be called the art part. She talks about how familiarity blinds us, and it does. But then the lens shifts and we look again with fresh eyes—and from different perspectives.

When she was asked how her paintings come into being, she answered, “I don’t like to make too much of it. I see, I read, and paintings come out through my hands.”

It’s an image that is beguiling: Caporael with paintings budding from her hands, her fingertips like a tree in bloom. It recalls the well-known quote about Gustave Courbet, who was said to produce paintings as simply and abundantly as an apple tree produces apples.

She draws all the time to keep her hand in, but she seldom paints exactly what she sees. Instead, she paints what interests her in what she sees. She described a house reflected on an artificial pond that she glimpses every now and then from her car while driving to her studio. One day she became aware of how it was “landscaped,” sited in such a way that it was not visible from the road except for an

instant, and only if she was looking for it. She never stopped to look at it longer, to see its details. She preferred instead to imagine it, to build it in her mind’s eye. The painting it inspired, 696 (Glimpse, Valley Farm Rd.), 2014, is almost as “not there” as the original house and its reflection. Indeed, her paintings often have the look of the temporarily present, of something on the verge of appearing or disappearing, an active mode, replicating, perhaps, the sensation of her initial glimpse for the viewer.

Nothing, she seems to tell us, is stable, and nothing is quite how we remember it; she is intrigued by the lapse, the disjunction.

Some of the paintings are derived from her drawings, and some are based on the work of others. One of her favorite ways of dealing with the landscape is what Stilgoe calls “transmission by example,” and what she calls the “afters”— after Vincent van Gogh, Jean-François Millet, Utagawa Hiroshige, Gustave Doré, Henry Darger.

When she follows how other artists have seen and painted the landscape, it helps her see. For instance, one of the paintings, 695 (A van Gogh perspective, after “La Crau”), 2014, reproduces the geometric structure underlying a van Gogh landscape from which the verdure has been stripped away. In another, based on a Darger work, 691 (Study for a de-populated Darger), 2014, she eliminated the Vivian girls in order to better regard the place and space he had imagined for them.

“All this, for me, is about learning. By making the van Gogh view large, I could see where he stood, and know what went on the paper first—the lines that would later be covered with the strokes we know so well. The Darger piece was revealing to me in a different way. Going through the motions of recreating his landscape, I understood that he really loved those odd girl/boy creatures—it is there in the extreme specificity in the landscapes he made for them.”

In her painting 700 (The pastoral exultation of Richard Prince), 2014, a small building studded with colorful, raised little discs of paint, was inspired by a Wall Street Journal article about Prince, who owns land upstate. With it was a photo of a house or a shed covered with vinyl records. Caporael was so delighted by it that she painted her own version, taking possession of it for herself.

Does that mean, she asked, that the possession of “a landscape” is a substitute for the possession of the land itself? And whose land is it? “Clearly, I’m not done visiting the landscape, and maybe won’t be until I dust it with my ashes,” she said.

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688 (Proximate cause)

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689 (Coharie sow farm, N.C.)

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691 (Study for a de-populated Darger)

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692 (At Jullo Callo, landscape after Darger)

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693 (The plan)

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695 (A van Gogh perspective, after “La Crau”)

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696 (Glimpse, Valley Farm Rd.)

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698 (Proximate cause, 2)

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700 (The pastoral exultation of Richard Prince)

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701 (Proprietary alfalfa)

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702 (Ride along; Wing Rd.)

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704 (Opium poppy field, Sinaloa, Mexico)

P l a t e L i st

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688 (Proximate cause), 2014 Oil on linen 54 x 72 inches (137.2 x 182.9 cm)

696 (Glimpse, Valley Farm Rd.), 2014 Oil on linen 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

S e l e ct P u b l i c C o l l e ct i o n s

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI

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689 (Coharie sow farm, N.C.), 2014 Oil on linen 48 x 66 inches (121.9 x 167.6 cm)

698 (Proximate cause, 2), 2014 Oil on linen 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

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691 (Study for a de-populated Darger), 2014 Oil on linen 30 x 20 inches (76.2 x 50.8 cm)

700 (The pastoral exultation of Richard Prince), 2014 Oil on linen 48 x 66 inches (121.9 x 167.6 cm)

Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI

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692 (At Jullo Callo, landscape after Darger), 2014 Oil on linen 54 x 72 inches (137.2 x 182.9 cm)

701 (Proprietary alfalfa), 2014 Oil on linen 48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

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693 (The plan), 2014 Oil on linen 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

702 (Ride along; Wing Rd.), 2014 Oil on linen 60 x 90 inches (152.4 x 228.6 cm)

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

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695 (A van Gogh perspective, after “La Crau”), 2014 Oil on linen 60 x 90 inches (152.4 x 228.6 cm)

704 (Opium poppy field, Sinaloa, Mexico), 2014 Oil on linen 48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

S u zan n e Caporae l T h e L a n d sc a p e 23 April – 23 May 2015 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel (212) 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

Publication © 2015 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Memory, Landscape, Invention © 2015 Lilly Wei

Catalogue designed by Dan Miller Design, New York Printed and bound by Puritan Capital, Hollis, New Hampshire Photography of the art by Tom Powel, New York

Made in the USA

IS B N 978-1-4951-3008-3