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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 and pathos of history. 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 Biennial's first Cuban pavilion (2011). His work encompasses sculpture, installation, and performance; as a painter, and in ways similar to his contemporaries—the Cubans Enrique Martínez Celaya and Alejandro Campins as well as Anselm Kiefer and Luc Tuymans—Capote has privileged landscape as a means of accessing existential, and universal, alienation.
In his evolving Isla series, Capote fashions 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. “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” (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.).
“We used to have a tradition of painting seascapes in Cuba,” Capote reflects, but inasmuch as Isla reprises that (national) genre, it also kindles classically art-historical conventions of sublime and symbolist color (ibid.). The series channels the emotional register of nineteenth-century landscape painting, spanning the melancholy and mysticism of Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich and the chromatic expressionism of J. M. W. Turner, all acknowledged sources. In Isla (partida), Capote ponders the ambiguity of departure—its seeming transience and unwitting permanence—in the rolling, infinite sea that stretches toward a densely clouded, opalescent sky. Four paintings from the Isla series (including the present work) surrounded Michelangelo Pistoletto’s installation, Around the World, Caribbean Sea, in the exhibition, Escala Humana, which opened at Havana’s Galleria Continua in 2022. The conceptual and literal mirroring of the words printed above the paintings—“partida” and “llegada” (spelled with its letters reversed)—made plain the global and historical circularity of their meaning, from the dawn of transatlantic trade to the contemporary crisis of human migration.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
In his evolving Isla series, Capote fashions 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. “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” (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.).
“We used to have a tradition of painting seascapes in Cuba,” Capote reflects, but inasmuch as Isla reprises that (national) genre, it also kindles classically art-historical conventions of sublime and symbolist color (ibid.). The series channels the emotional register of nineteenth-century landscape painting, spanning the melancholy and mysticism of Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich and the chromatic expressionism of J. M. W. Turner, all acknowledged sources. In Isla (partida), Capote ponders the ambiguity of departure—its seeming transience and unwitting permanence—in the rolling, infinite sea that stretches toward a densely clouded, opalescent sky. Four paintings from the Isla series (including the present work) surrounded Michelangelo Pistoletto’s installation, Around the World, Caribbean Sea, in the exhibition, Escala Humana, which opened at Havana’s Galleria Continua in 2022. The conceptual and literal mirroring of the words printed above the paintings—“partida” and “llegada” (spelled with its letters reversed)—made plain the global and historical circularity of their meaning, from the dawn of transatlantic trade to the contemporary crisis of human migration.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park