Suzanne Caporael “What Follows Here”

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

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AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE presents an exhibition of recent works by Suzanne Caporael.

For almost three decades, Suzanne Caporael has created spare but evocative paintings inspired by the natural world and the human desire to control it. In these palimpsest landscapes, she employs a minimalist aesthetic as the language of suggestion. The allusive shapes occupy quietly contradictory spatial realms, and—as with words in poetry—we encounter shifts in meaning. The richness of color and composition belie the problematic contradiction inherent in a deep love of place also haunted by an underlying narrative of loss.

The paintings’ titles, implicit rather than descriptive, reveal an engagement with such questions. The large, cool blue- infused 719 (D. Balmori island) pays rapturous homage to the recently deceased architect Diana Balmori and her work on phytoremediation (the treatment of environmental problems through the use of plants). 720 (read the spill), with its seven-foot expanse of red, was inspired by the artist’s friend (a NASA scientist) and his daily updates on his exploration of an oil leak that has persisted for over twelve years.

Naturalists say that the purpose of beauty is to call attention to its subject. Caporael concurs, and as a painter since early childhood, she brings the forces of skill and mature intellect to the process. Concise and incisively rendered with simple lines and shapes, her work has been called astonishingly lush.

The subjective experience of attempting to hold one of these deliberately elusive paintings in an aesthetic embrace returns one to the notion of place—and of the painting as a repository of ideas. As Carter Ratcliff writes, Caporael “has invented a pictorial repertory that focuses the generalizing, synthesizing power of abstraction, not on metaphysical absolutes but on the shifting, enveloping world that we experience from moment to moment.”

As noted in The New York Times, “Caporael’s paintings are a curious mix of the aesthetic and the conceptual…the paintings are sensuous and lyrical as well as rigorously formal.” Caporael continues to create paintings that both display and invoke a discipline of thought.
SUZANNE CAPORAEL was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949, and has lived in twenty-five states. The artist earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. She had her first show at thirty-five, when then Director Paul Schimmel debuted her work at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). She was awarded a National Endowment grant in painting in 1986, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009 she was a guest artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The artist’s prints are published in collaboration with Tandem Press, Madison, WI.
Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.

Suzanne Caporael lives and works in Lakeville, CT with her husband, novelist, Bruce Murkoff.