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Lot Essay
Among Cuba’s foremost conceptual artists, Capote has cultivated a singular practice in which poignant, material metaphors suggest the vicissitudes of contemporary human 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, representing his country in the Venice Biennale’s first Cuban pavilion (2011) and participating in major group shows, recent among them Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2017) and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, 2017). His multimedia practice 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.
For his evolving Isla series, featured in solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery (New York, 2017) and Ben Brown Fine Arts (Hong Kong, 2019), 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 when hung together are meant to share a single horizon line, simulating “the dynamic effect of the moving ocean,” Capote continues. “The levels in height can suggest an undulation, or a seasickness; 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.”1
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.”2
“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. 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. Seen collectively, the paintings impart a “progression towards abstraction,” Capote observes. “I was interested in something like what Mondrian did: beginning with landscapes and ending up at abstraction. In going from the most classically grounded point to the further extremes of abstraction, to resolve this theme and this lineage.”3 Atmospheric and painterly abstractions, the seascapes render a universal theater of human existence, but one nevertheless profoundly personal, and sinister: “the death and drama are connected in symbolic ways, as an allegory of the Cuban experience—all the people who die [on the water].”4
Isla (Eterno retorno) describes a greenish sea with dark, undulating waves that reflect the creamy opalescence of the sky. Slender strokes of impasto, rendered in gleaming marine tones suggestive of early dawn, echo the barbed shape of the fishhooks. The image’s relentless lateral motion, felt in each tactile brushstroke and wiry ripple, evokes an endless horizon of sea and sky. The painting’s subtitle refers to the ancient, and more recently Nietzschean, idea of eternal return, which posits that existence is cyclical, that we are bound to repeat the events of our lives forevermore. This existential reckoning—to what past do we owe our present existence?—may seem tortuous, but Capote here compels us to examine the value of our life and work, to affirm what ultimately stands the test of time.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
For his evolving Isla series, featured in solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery (New York, 2017) and Ben Brown Fine Arts (Hong Kong, 2019), 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 when hung together are meant to share a single horizon line, simulating “the dynamic effect of the moving ocean,” Capote continues. “The levels in height can suggest an undulation, or a seasickness; 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.”1
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.”2
“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. 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. Seen collectively, the paintings impart a “progression towards abstraction,” Capote observes. “I was interested in something like what Mondrian did: beginning with landscapes and ending up at abstraction. In going from the most classically grounded point to the further extremes of abstraction, to resolve this theme and this lineage.”3 Atmospheric and painterly abstractions, the seascapes render a universal theater of human existence, but one nevertheless profoundly personal, and sinister: “the death and drama are connected in symbolic ways, as an allegory of the Cuban experience—all the people who die [on the water].”4
Isla (Eterno retorno) describes a greenish sea with dark, undulating waves that reflect the creamy opalescence of the sky. Slender strokes of impasto, rendered in gleaming marine tones suggestive of early dawn, echo the barbed shape of the fishhooks. The image’s relentless lateral motion, felt in each tactile brushstroke and wiry ripple, evokes an endless horizon of sea and sky. The painting’s subtitle refers to the ancient, and more recently Nietzschean, idea of eternal return, which posits that existence is cyclical, that we are bound to repeat the events of our lives forevermore. This existential reckoning—to what past do we owe our present existence?—may seem tortuous, but Capote here compels us to examine the value of our life and work, to affirm what ultimately stands the test of time.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park