Alfond Collection: Artists C-E

Yoan Capote’s sculptures poignantly depict how bodies can reflect—and resist—the weight of “what cannot be said.” Over the past decade he has become internationally known for creating concise material metaphors for the complex limits on personal and public expression that specifically impact his life in Havana, Cuba, and in a universal sense, affect all of us. An exceptional draftsman and carver, Capote will often focus on mouths, ears, hands—each body part conceptually stands for the whole exchange of civil discourse and being heard. For example, his 2004–12 sculpture series Stress compresses rows of cast human teeth under stacked concrete cubes to suggest the tortuous difficulty of speaking out against improbable pressures. And his 2007–8 installation Mass Portrait (lot) assembles a group of rough-cut stones with life-like ears carved on either side, marking otherwise unidentifiable individuals who have no mouths to respond to what they hear. Yet in each case, Capote’s hefty figures are imbued with stony, obdurate strength. They do not collapse.

Begun in 2011 and first exhibited in Havana, Capote’s series Abstinencia introduces critically coded and collective gestures that defy such social restraint and complicit self-silence. He cast in various bronze patinas the hands of anonymous Cubans as they formed letters in sign language, and then sequenced them to spell out meaningful words: política, religión, economía. Capote defines each as “an ironical expression of the ordinary person’s lack of any voice or social decision-making power with regard to [such] key contemporary issues,” whether in Castro’s Cuba or beyond.[1] Capote subsequently expanded the project to include terms never exhibited in Cuba: democracia and libertad. Within the series, Abstencia (Libertad) is the only part created in the United States—in this case, commissioned specifically for the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art—and speaks to the unique complexities of a nation that holds “liberty” in ultimate esteem. Created from the hands of Latino immigrant laborers in a foundry in New York, Libertad maintains the series’ critical resonance but shifts its focus to ask: What is abstinent, absent, or unsaid here? Is true liberty lacking for the laborers whose hands are cast? When parts represent the whole, the metaphor is called a synecdoche, from the Greek for “simultaneous understanding.” Here the parts of Capote’s Libertad invite us to simultaneously feel the strain between personal aspiration and a national ideal.

--Jen Mergel

Rosemarie Castoro is a noted minimalist sculptor, writer, and painter. She used tape to create architectural interventions as exemplified by Room Cracking (1969)—in which she laid tape on a wall and across the floor at Paula Cooper Gallery—and her conceptual journal entries sparked the interest of art historian Lucy Lippard. In 1965, she began making a series of Y paintings. The majority of these paintings remained rolled in the artist’s studio until recently. Often featuring a strong, even vibrant, color palette, these works are masterful examples of minimalism. While the Y was a dominant form for the artist in her paintings of the sixties, Castoro also chose to create a number of paintings depicting small rectangular bars. Both types of canvases favored hard edges.

Green Blue Orange Y features interlocking triangular forms that create a sense of movement and offer vigorous optical stimulation. Some of the tracing marks outlining the Y forms remain visible to the naked eye; Castoro’s intentional choice not to remove the tracing as she painted the canvas emphasizes the artist’s hand and her creative process. The interplay between the forms evokes the artist’s interest in dance and choreography. When asked about this influence, Castoro affirmed the connection, but emphasized that all of her experiences and knowledge are manifested in these paintings, yielding complex work that is a product of a multitude of influences.[1] For instance, architectural forms—in particular the cobblestone streets of SoHo, where she remains a longtime resident—offered an important stimulus for her minimalist work.[2] The hard edges of the stone, which function as units of a larger surface, share an affinity with her approach to painting.

Castoro’s work, exhibited intermittently over the years, remains in obscurity compared to that of some of the well-known minimalists she interacted with during the 1960s. With the recovery of these paintings and heightened interest in her writings and sculptures, the work and contributions of Rosemarie Castoro warrant further consideration and research.

--Amy Galpin

--Laura Beshears

Since the late 1990s, Martí Cormand has been making paintings and drawings that address the nature of representation in the digital age and the ephemerality––or endurance––of physical materials. Often working in series, he applies the same precision and attention to detail whether he is working with paint or more unconventional media, such as cardboard and packaging materials.

In the series Formalizing their concept, Cormand surveys the landscape of contemporary art and re-conceives other artists’ work. Reflecting on Conceptual artists of a previous generation, he meticulously reproduces their iconic pieces in graphite and oil on paper. Cormand includes a range of international artists, such as American Lawrence Weiner, Brazilian Cildo Meireles, and Belgian Marcel Broodthaers, reflecting the international reach of Conceptual art during the 1970s. Cormand employs a detached, documentary approach in his photorealist renderings of these works.

In revisiting these now-historical pieces, Cormand reflects on how they are currently understood and framed. He does so by returning to graphite and oil—the very conventional media these artists sought to undermine. The idea of “formalizing” suggested by his titles implies a re-institutionalization of Conceptual art within traditional media.

--Martina Tanga

In Lawrence Weiner’s “A translation from one language to another” 1969 (2012), he depicts Weiner’s stenciled “statement” in its original installation. The sentence sits flatly in Cormand’s painting just as it floats frontally on the wall, in contrast to the receding diagonal lines of the gallery space. In Cildo Meireles’ “Insertions Into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project” 1970 (2012), Cormand refers to an iconic intervention in which Meireles shows three Coca-Cola bottles––the first one full, the second half full, and the last empty––in order to explore the notion of circulation and exchange of goods. Cormand presents the motif in three different paintings, altering the original by depicting certain bottles as spectral apparitions, their form created by the faintest lines of graphite and oil.

At first glance, David Diao’s painting appears to obey the tenets of modernism: flat, autonomous, non-referential. Geometric shapes align along a central axis against a monochromatic background, without depth or illusion. Yet the very title belies these attributes. With Barnett Newman: The Unfinished Paintings, Diao uses specific referents to shift the painting’s register from abstraction to representation. Thanks to the title, rather than seeing independent forms set on a solid ground, we read the painting’s elements as a selection of canonical abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman’s late works. The title transforms the image into a neatly ordered modernist cabinet of curiosities. It represents a collection of fragments that speak to the history of painting, a medium that Diao describes as having been in “perpetual crisis.”

Diao started his Barnett Newman series in 1990. He admired the artist for his intellectual take on abstract expressionism. Newman sought to create a painting that could convey pure presence. Solid fields of color, interrupted by “zips” or vertical stripes, would call out directly to the viewer. Diao, part of the generation of painters that came after Newman, is less convinced of painting’s ability to speak for itself. His work has, in various ways, served as a commentary on the history of painting. Other series address the works of Kazimir Malevich, Kostantin Melnikov, and in several self-referential pieces, Diao’s own work. In Home Again (2013), Diao tracks the path of one of his paintings through the art market. He documents its plummeting price after the first owners sold it without a reserve, and Diao’s repurchasing of the painting later on. This frank acknowledgment of the business of art is typical of postmodernism, but Home Again, like Barnett Newman: The Unfinished Paintings, lacks the cynicism so often found in postmodernist practice.

Diao admits that his paintings could be understood as “inside jokes,” yet their strong formal arrangements speak for themselves. By keeping two opposing modalities of painting—abstraction and representation—in tension, Diao creates visually compelling works that only become richer once their context is known.

--Kelly Presutti

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs are not the informal snapshots they appear to be. By the time diCorcia began working in the early 1980s, photography was at last considered an artistic medium on a par with other fine-art categories. With his meticulously crafted and preconceived images, rendered with a signature style of lighting, composition, and presentation of subjects, diCorcia breached the delta between the real and the produced. His sensitivity to the confusion of fact and fiction made him the ideal collaborator for W magazine, as his treatment of people and places paralleled the hyper-real/fantastical vernacular common to fashion magazine spreads.

At first, diCorcia’s most frequent subject was his family and friends captured in fictional interior tableaus. He then began to photograph pedestrians in places like Hollywood and New York, an approach he pursued throughout the late 1980s and ’90s. In these and other works, diCorcia presents fragmented narratives that rely on the tension between the casual and the posed, and the unforeseen and the fated, all accentuated by distinctive lighting methods that have been compared to those of Baroque painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Almost always a blend of natural and artificial, his illumination activates his scenes.

In W, September 2000 #6 (2000), one of a series of eleven works diCorcia created for W magazine between 1997 and 2008, two ladies dine with a young man. What appears to be a stark, harshly lit environment on closer inspection is revealed to be the iconic restaurant of the World Trade Center in New York City. Now indelibly associated with the September 11, 2001, attacks, Windows on the World was once a place for power breakfasts and celebratory meals––a location loaded with social and cultural meaning. diCorcia’s characters have a veneer of propriety, but the tension in their exchange is highlighted by the image’s composition and intensely felt by the viewer. Despite their lively conversation in a purportedly perfect place, the figures appear isolated. In an interview with Lynne Tillman in 2007, diCorcia explained: “One thing I’ve tried to avoid . . . is nostalgia. It is one of the cheapest forms of content.” diCorcia spares nothing in his rigorous pursuit, through fiction, of a real kind of truth.

--Martina Tanga

Tracey Emin rose to prominence in the 1990s as part of a loosely defined group that came to be known as the Young British Artists, or YBAs. United by a series of exhibitions and the patronage of collectors like Charles Saatchi, the YBAs shared an interest in using graphic imagery to treat provocative themes. Their confrontational subject matter—in conjunction with their strategic self-promotion—led some critics to accuse them of relying on shock tactics rather than artistic talent. Emin in particular was singled out for her honest but explicit incorporation of her personal history into her installation My Bed, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. Controversy has indeed become a signature element of her installations, sculptures, paintings, and neon signs, not to mention her public appearances and even her personal life. However, to reduce her work to its shock value would overlook the complex ways that she juxtaposes the binaries of the public and the private, the universal and the personal.

Everything for Love (2005) reflects Emin’s diaristic, autobiographical approach. The ambiguous meaning and atmospheric blue glow of the handwritten text give this piece a confessional character. Yet Emin communicates her private sentiment using a public mode of address—the neon sign. Though typically used for advertisements or commercial slogans, she uses neon to express intimate emotions. Emin is far from the first artist to use neon as a medium. Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, and Joseph Kosuth were among the first artists to introduce this industrial material into the realm of high art in the 1960s, inspiring other artists to do the same in the decades that followed. What makes Emin original is the way she blurs the boundary between public and private by expressing intensely intimate ideas in the open forums of museums and galleries. This gesture recalls the feminist dictum that “The Personal Is Political” by suggesting that her own experiences and emotions are connected to larger social issues. Even with these feminist implications, Everything for Love is a universal sentiment that appeals to a broad audience. As time passes, Emin’s work takes on an even deeper resonance as social media and other new technologies increasingly destabilize the boundary between public and private.

--Sarah Parrish

Moroccan-American photographer Lalla Essaydi explores the ways that gender and power—as well as identity and beauty—are inscribed on Muslim women’s bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Her highly composed, cinematic scenes draw on longstanding conventions that Western artists have used to visualize North Africa and the Middle East. However, she intervenes in these Orientalist fantasies with an insider’s understanding of the subordination women experience in some Islamic societies. Her signature use of Arabic calligraphy is a case in point. To compose many of her photographs, which she creates in series, she meticulously covers every surface in henna-hued script, from the blank backdrops to her models’ clothing and skin. Essaydi transgresses Arab gender norms by combining henna—which is used to decorate the hands and feet of brides—with the exclusively male practice of calligraphy. This nuanced treatment of gender is a response to the discrimination she experienced while growing up in Morocco and living in Saudi Arabia, adding an autobiographical dimension to her work.

Essaydi’s post-colonial perspective is evident in Harem #I (2009), which deliberately combines imperialist nostalgia with contemporary realities. The ordered, symmetrical composition visually reinforces the hierarchical layers of Islamic architecture, which define who has access to the public space and the marketplace of ideas, and who does not. Similarly, the receding columns and the radial lines of tilework conform to a Western system of one-point perspective that funnels the viewer’s gaze toward the ultimate symbol of Orientalism: the recumbent, sexually available odalisque. Although the model poses in the fashion of this familiar stereotype, Essaydi invokes the trope in order to deconstruct it. This woman presents herself as a subject in her own right, a unique individual rather than an anonymous ideal. Henna script interrupts the viewer’s easy visual consumption of her body. Furthermore, her direct gaze makes the viewer uncomfortably aware of his or her own voyeurism. This mix of agency and objectification is typical of Essaydi’s photographs. Although she is critical of Muslim gender divisions and European and American misconceptions about them, her empathetic approach to her subject reveals her pride in her culture, which she presents to a global audience in all its complexity.

--Sarah Parrish