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Lot Essay
Among Cuba’s foremost conceptual artists, Capote has cultivated a multimedia practice in which poignant, material metaphors convey the vicissitudes of human and psychic experience. Raised in the western province of Pinar del Río, he studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte under René Francisco from 1996 to 2001. Since his acclaimed collaboration with the collective DUPP at the 7th Havana Biennial (2000), Capote has exhibited widely and represented his country in the Venice Biennale’s first Cuban pavilion (2011). His work encompasses sculpture, installation, and performance; as a painter, and in ways similar to his contemporaries Enrique Martínez Celaya and Alejandro Campins, Capote has privileged landscape as a means of accessing existential, and universal, alienation.
In his evolving Isla series, Capote has fashioned brooding seascapes out of thousands of fishhooks that are hand-sewn into heavily impastoed canvas. “The series began around the notion of the island,” he explains, “and its meaning is precisely that: isolation, being always surrounded by water; being impossibly distant from other spaces. . . . That sense of isolation—of feeling fenced in by a steel barrier, of being up against a wall—is everywhere. These are intense shared emotional states that all empty into the sea.” Though of varying dimensions, the paintings are meant to share a single horizon line when hung together, as across the two panels of Isla (in memoriam), the first work in this paradigmatic series. “The levels in height can suggest an undulation, or a seasickness,” Capote continues. “They give a sense of motion even though, as with the ocean itself, the horizon line remains fixed. They are also like windows, so it gives the viewer the effect of being surrounded by the sea” (quoted in L. Pedro, “Yoan Capote,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2017).
The series has a point of origin in the term “Iron Curtain,” used by Winston Churchill to characterize the ideological boundaries of the Cold War. “I remember thinking,” Capote recalls of his student years, “In Cuba we don’t need a wall—our iron curtain is the sea.” He sourced fishhooks from local antique dealers and fishermen, from whom he acquired the old machinery that was used to create palangres (trawl lines hung with hundreds of baited hooks). “The hook is a symbol of seduction,” he considers, and yet “it’s also perhaps the most primal trap humanity devised, going back to our earliest days hunting and fishing. From afar, I wanted the viewer to be lured, drawn in, seduced by the hooks. Once the viewer comes close, the material force of the object makes itself felt” (ibid.).
Isla (in memoriam) describes a dark, ominous sea whose undulating waves—comprised of about 100,000 fishhooks—stretch across the panels, reflecting the pale opalescence of the sky. Capote accidently hurt himself in the process of making this piece, leaving traces of his own blood on the painting’s surface. Allegorical associations between blood and water—life and death, sacrifice and redemption—cast back to the work’s title and its function as a memorial to those lost, and separated by, the sea.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
In his evolving Isla series, Capote has fashioned brooding seascapes out of thousands of fishhooks that are hand-sewn into heavily impastoed canvas. “The series began around the notion of the island,” he explains, “and its meaning is precisely that: isolation, being always surrounded by water; being impossibly distant from other spaces. . . . That sense of isolation—of feeling fenced in by a steel barrier, of being up against a wall—is everywhere. These are intense shared emotional states that all empty into the sea.” Though of varying dimensions, the paintings are meant to share a single horizon line when hung together, as across the two panels of Isla (in memoriam), the first work in this paradigmatic series. “The levels in height can suggest an undulation, or a seasickness,” Capote continues. “They give a sense of motion even though, as with the ocean itself, the horizon line remains fixed. They are also like windows, so it gives the viewer the effect of being surrounded by the sea” (quoted in L. Pedro, “Yoan Capote,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2017).
The series has a point of origin in the term “Iron Curtain,” used by Winston Churchill to characterize the ideological boundaries of the Cold War. “I remember thinking,” Capote recalls of his student years, “In Cuba we don’t need a wall—our iron curtain is the sea.” He sourced fishhooks from local antique dealers and fishermen, from whom he acquired the old machinery that was used to create palangres (trawl lines hung with hundreds of baited hooks). “The hook is a symbol of seduction,” he considers, and yet “it’s also perhaps the most primal trap humanity devised, going back to our earliest days hunting and fishing. From afar, I wanted the viewer to be lured, drawn in, seduced by the hooks. Once the viewer comes close, the material force of the object makes itself felt” (ibid.).
Isla (in memoriam) describes a dark, ominous sea whose undulating waves—comprised of about 100,000 fishhooks—stretch across the panels, reflecting the pale opalescence of the sky. Capote accidently hurt himself in the process of making this piece, leaving traces of his own blood on the painting’s surface. Allegorical associations between blood and water—life and death, sacrifice and redemption—cast back to the work’s title and its function as a memorial to those lost, and separated by, the sea.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park