PROOF
Leslie Camhi
“The square is death; the triangle is vehemence. The circle is blue and is infinite and peaceful.” —Donald Judd
Donald Judd’s essay, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” (1993), includes a brief historical survey of artistic approaches to color. The study of color, he says, has been part of science since at least the seventeenth century, though he adds, “Like astronomy, it has been cursed with its own astrology.” He cites the artists/educators Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky, whose classes at the Bauhaus taught “that colors always produce the same emotions, and also that colors always correspond to certain shapes, the two together agreeing on the emotion.”
Yet the operations of color are enigmatic. Though a phenomenon obedient to scientific laws of physics and physiology, our experience of color is intensely subjective and personal. Eons ago, when I was a teenage art student, Josef Albers’s optical experiments with and philosophy of color were foundational. Albers had been both a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus, yet he began his classic treatise, The Interaction of Color (1963), by stating that color is “the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”
Suzanne Caporael is a consummate colorist. The abstract canvases in Proof, her current series of works, are imbued with such subtle and varied hues that they strain my rather limited store of chromatic nomenclature. Her paintings navigate an in-between space, gesturing toward disembodied realms of mathematical or logical thinking—“proofs”—while compelling the viewer’s sensual engagement with her materials. In person, her works exert a remarkable presence,
similar to a stage actor’s charisma. Yet the dramas her works enact—foldings, crossings, vibrations, levitations, all of these spatial operations played out within the confines of the canvas’s two dimensions—are far from momentary. The painted surfaces, as softly seductive as human skin, have been built up layer by layer over time, revealing their secrets slowly. Whatever is going on in them keeps us looking.
As antidotes to the myriad images fashioned for immediate consumption and gratification that have increasingly dominated our society, Caporael’s paintings withhold certainty. In doing so, they reward sustained contemplation.
In math and logic, “proof” is a sequence of steps by which a theorem is derived from given premises. A proof, in that sense, helps to establish an empirical reality. A secondary meaning finds “proof” serving as a unit of measurement, for the invulnerability of armor, for example, or the strength of alcohol. Finally, a “proof” can also be a trial or a test case. In engraving or printmaking, a proof is a first impression, often subject to later correction.
Meticulously plotted and fully realized, there is nothing tentative or provisional about Caporael’s paintings. Certainly, they offer evidence, or “proof,” of their maker’s intense curiosity as she borrows categorical properties from other disciplines. A series of now-discarded titles for the works referenced distinguished theorists who expanded the boundaries of our understanding of shapes and numbers, from the great eighteenth century Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler, to twenty-first century titans of knot theory and the mathematics of paper folding.
But these works are also test cases. Caporael is like an ice fisher dropping a line into the unseen depths of a given topic and patiently waiting. The paintings are what she brings to the surface.
Sometimes her paintings appear to defy gravity. The thin cobalt lines dividing each of two mustard yellow rectangles into four parts of equal area (painting No. 780 (2023)), or the Prussian blue
dot at the center of a series of precisely placed spots in different colors that together delineate an imaginary sphere (painting No. 783 (2023)) seem to float in the air, optically hovering over their Belgian Linen supports.
The monumental cornflower blue squiggles in a diptych (painting No. 794 (2024))—with the righthand squiggle a slightly paler, near-reflection of the looping form on the left—are too controlled and stately to be the free-hand doodlings for which we might at first mistake them. In fact, the vertical orientation of this pair recalls a double portrait; it’s a geometric or topological version, if you will, of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Except that the elderly couple here—the same, only different, and companions through long decades of mathematical research—are derived from two classic formations in knot theory: the Conway knot and its mutation, the Kinoshita-Terasaka knot. (A traveler to Cambridge University in England will find versions of these squiggles adorning the metal gates of the university’s Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.)
Each of the knots’ eleven intersections occasions, for the viewer, a moment of hesitation. Does the line loop over or under itself? An ambiguous three-dimensionality also troubles painting No. 772, where a nine-sided figure, divided into irregular wedges of ochre, moss green, teal, and aubergine, is bisected vertically by a yellow arc. The mind stumbles as it tries to read this image, unsure of whether the arc represents a cut, a fold, or refracted light. And this delicate balancing act on the cusp of cognition commands our attention.
In the 1930s, the expatriate American artist Man Ray visited the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris to photograph a series of three-dimensional metal, wire, plaster, and wood models that had been designed as illustrations for algebraic equations. More than a decade later, while living in Hollywood, he created a suite of paintings based on these photographs, which he titled Shakespearean Equations. Man Ray, a Surrealist, turned to mathematical forms as an aid in producing what the nineteenth century French poet Arthur Rimbaud had termed “le dérèglement de tous les sens”(“the deregulation of all sensory experiences/meanings”), and which Surrealism had adopted as one of the primary goals of poetry and art.
Born in Brooklyn in 1949, Suzanne Caporael began painting around the age of five. She had been painting for close to three decades when graduate studies at the Otis Art Institute in 1970s Los Angeles diverted her attention. She put down her brush, as she and her fellow students were influenced by Conceptual artists Michael Asher and John Knight, who were known for temporary installations involving deceptively simple gestures. The art world of the 1970s was context for work that unfolded primarily in the viewer’s experience of shifting frames of reference.
Though Caporael eventually returned to painting, she never shook off her education. Her abstract canvases, many of which began as exquisite, small collages made on the road during exploratory travels, are rooted in her observations of the natural world and the efforts of other disciplines–science, for example, or math–to define and understand it.
When she turned forty, Caporael began numbering her paintings. While she destroys about a third of her canvases, as of this writing, she has arrived at painting No. 807 (2024). Her paintings are windows into the workings of a singular mind and practiced eye, engaged in a dance between sense and sensibility.
Leslie Camhi’s essays on art, books, and women’s lives, including her own life and travels, appear regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. A frequent contributor to art museum and gallery catalogs, she also holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale University, with scholarly publications on kleptomania and 19th-century French medical photography. Her first translation, from French, of Violaine Huisman’s The Book of Mother was a New York Times Notable Book of 2022 and long-listed for the International Booker Prize.
168
No. 772, 2023
Oil on linen
66 x 54 inches
x 137 cm
66
168
No. 773, 2023
Oil on linen
x 84 inches
x 213 cm
No. 780, 2023
Oil on linen
54 x 42 inches
137 x 107 cm
No. 785, 2023
Oil on linen
54 x 84 inches
137 x 213 cm
66
168
No. 791, 2023
Oil on linen
x 54 inches
x 137 cm
No. 792, 2023
Oil on linen
54 x 42 inches
137 x 107 cm
66
168 x 152 cm
No. 794, 2024
Oil on linen
x 60 inches
66
84 inches
168 x 213 cm
No. 795, 2024
Oil on linen
x
137
No. 796, 2024
Oil on linen
54 x 42 inches
x 107 cm
137
No. 797, 2024
Oil on linen
54 x 42 inches
x 107 cm
66
168 x 137 cm
No. 798, 2024
Oil on linen
x 54 inches
84
213 x 168 cm
No. 799, 2024
Oil on linen
x 66 inches
66
168 x 152 cm
No. 800, 2024
Oil on linen
x 60 inches
66
168
No. 801, 2024
Oil on linen
x 54 inches
x 137 cm
122 x 91 cm
No. 802, 2024
Oil on linen
48 x 36 inches
48
122 x 91 cm
No. 803, 2024
Oil on linen
x 36 inches
66
168 x 152 cm
No. 805, 2024
Oil on linen
x 60 inches
84
213 x 168 cm
No. 806, 2024
Oil on linen
x 66 inches
66
168
No. 807, 2024
Oil on linen
x 54 inches
x 137 cm
CARD MAGIC
Stephen Westfall
We tend to think of a semiotic sign as a mental event rather than a material one. Even when such a sign controls the visual field of a painting it is surprising to find the sign cohabitating with a perception of material density. But maybe that’s partly what “abstract” painting is. A painting is a thing, like a book or a stone. Traditionally, it is a thing that portrays another thing or things: a saint, a landscape, a still life. An abstract painting, on the other hand, throws that function into such doubt that we are impelled to begin again with the thingness of it: its scale, its colors, its surface. As an abstract painting’s physical and perceptual attributes add up, an image may or may not form. When an image does, it sometimes coheres in a realm closer to what we remember pictures to be, geometric facets of color aligning with the interior textures and tobacco light of a Parisian café, a church façade glowing in late afternoon light, a pier extending into a slightly choppy sea, a monumental coffee cup with the curves of a female body. At other times, brushwork fills the canvas, atomizing color and figure/ground relations so that the painting is really presenting an image of itself: floating rectangles of color on color, end-to-end drizzled and flung skeins of black enamel, a flatly painted blue trapezoid poised on its point at the widest corner. We look at such paintings and find little or no illusionistic space to enter, perhaps to uncover other known things that are hidden in plain sight. What we do have are paintings that maintain their identity as “painting” (here, a frozen verb) and “paintings” (there, a collection of nouns). I see that I am making lists, and as I go on, they have become more specific to painters we know.
As paintings become more abstract, they increasingly signify a cultural activity, a cult of authorship, an inversion of staged space—so that the painting itself is the “figure” against the “ground” of the wall and the “field” of the room. Semiotics has a lot to say about a Titian, for example, but finds itself directly addressed by abstract painting. Suzanne Caporael has been painting for de-
cades in a way that reminds me of an extended journey from an outdoor field to a semiotic field, wherein one’s ability to ascertain meaning relies on a keen memory of the world of perceptual experience and an appreciation for the indoor theater of a painting’s presentation, both singly and in concert with neighboring paintings. In the early 2000s, Caporael was keying flat bands of color to language from Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe, a 1990 essay in book form that argues for the necessity of language for seeing landscape—or seascape. The paintings from twenty years ago display important consistencies with the painting techniques and color with which Caporael is still engaged. She fleshes out shapes with flat color applied by brush, often wiping paint away from the ground where she doesn’t want it. The wiping leaves an atmospheric film, a spare translucency that nests or imbeds the abstracted figures in a milky surround. In her paintings of twenty years ago, the residue appears somewhat stronger in trace color, and the figures twist and fan across the surface of the canvases. In her most recent work, she has muted the field with a deliberately cleaner wipe, and the field has relatively stabilized, for now, into a bordering frame. Of course, the borders are contested. They shrink and expand, and in a couple of paintings they yield entirely to color. But, in relation to her earlier paintings, the recent ones are more consistently “abstract.” To understand how and why, it is necessary to recap a bit, if only to grasp the breadth of Caporael’s concerns and achievement.
For several years, Caporael toggled back and forth between more purely abstract planar imagery and the distillation of natural landscape forms and colors into flat planes that might interlock like Giorgio Morandi’s bottles or attenuate into linear networks of landscape borders that widen and diminish in perspective. But her flatter and more tonal color was more reminiscent of Alex Katz’s early collages. Over time, there has been a near-kaleidoscopic, recombinant shifting of the planes of color away from alignment with familiar places and things. Or maybe it’s “through and away from,” because doubling back to 2008 we can see her laying out an index of abstract planar interactions in a 12-by-9-inch format. And there is the through line of her collage practice that carves and reassembles flat colors and patterns from The New York Times into tightly packed abstract compositions on an intimate scale. Again, the color in the collages is tonal, as colors soften and darken somewhat when printed on newsprint.
In 2014 and 2015, Caporael was once again in an overt landscape phase. She even had a show in 2015 at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe titled The Landscape. Those years may mark the apogee of her explicit references to the natural world, at least thus far. The abstracting essentialism of her style doesn’t conceal that we are looking at estuaries, meadows, horizons, and agricultural divisions of fields. As the abstract impulse has become more assertive in subsequent exhibitions, we have been led to question whether Caporael has foresworn the world of things or has taken us through an elision between the outside world and her interior world, to her “inscape,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the landscapes of imagination.
Caporael’s interiority remains haunted by “things,” but those things are allowed to morph from the textures and gravity of the natural world to intuitive geometries of rectilinear and diagonal folding planes. A number of her recent configurations are inspired by Haga’s Theorem, which has its origin in origami paper folding. Origami papers are usually square, and Haga’s Theorem, which draws on the premise that similar shapes have similar angles, proposes that similar interior and exterior triangles can be generated by a simple fold in a square sheet of paper. Thus, in her painting No. 797 (2024), the hypotenuse of a taupe triangle runs from the left top portion of a square to a point roughly three quarters of the way down on the right side of the square. The top right triangle of the square that is revealed by the hypotenuse is a warm earth red, while the rest of the square, angled around the taupe triangle, is a tonal blue, except for a circle on the lower left, which is the same wiped-down off-white as the outside border of the picture plane that compositionally holds the square in place. The downward point of the taupe triangle overlaps into the circle. In the midst of all these reveals and crossovers, a certain perceptual magic begins to unfold.
All of Caporael’s color planes appear to be flat and hovering ever so slightly out in front of the off-white ground plane. They have an even density in their flatness and tonality that gives them a peculiar body, with more solidity than a visibly brushy fill would impart. At the same time, Caporael’s wiping technique leaves the faint tremor of a shadow at their edges, even in the edge of the interior circle in No. 797. The wiping also smears the residue of the pencil lines setting the
shapes, activating the field a bit further. This effect is more pronounced in the paintings No. 784 (2023) and No. 773 (2023), where the drawn geometric diagram spans the entire field and color is more sparingly interjected. In all her works, we have a sense that we are looking at two different levels that are nevertheless quite close to each other: shapes of an evenly emulsified, opaque color film just lifting off a milky surface that seems on the verge of becoming an atmosphere. This “uncanny valley” effect is the result of the paintings’ tight spatiality, set into a scale that is just big enough to address architecture while still embracing the gaze of the viewer. Somehow, this controlled spatial impression in a simple hieratic presentation of geometric shapes packs muffled perceptual wallop.
The milky white of the canvas is even exposed at edges between nested shapes in which one color doesn’t quite meet the other. But there’s a fullness in the color and in the compositional structures that overrides any sense of incompleteness, even when the viewer is a short distance from the canvas. As with icon paintings, the interiors of Caporael’s flat colors are infinite. Icon painters painted in flat colors because they were painting the spaces of the eternal and infinite, and they instinctively knew that infinity is as close as it is far away. Thus, color doesn’t recede, but pushes toward us with the even consistency of the interior of a stick of butter. Everything is before you in Caporael’s paintings; nothing is concealed. Magicians know that the highest art in magic is card magic, because it is the most intimate: Seemingly nothing can be hidden at your dinner table, but a deck of cards can turn the universe inside out without disturbing the wine in your glass. It’s not a trick; it’s an art.
Stephen Westfall is a painter and writer living in New York. He is Professor Emeritus at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
SUZANNE CAPORAEL PROOF
5 September – 26 October 2024
Miles McEnery Gallery 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved
Essay © 2024 Leslie Camhi Essay © 2024 Stephen Westfall
Associate Director Julia Schlank, New York, NY
Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY
Catalogue layout by Allison Leung
ISBN: 979-8-3507-3530-7
Cover: No. 797,(detail), 2024
