Suzanne Caporael
SUZANNE CAPORAEL
The Memory Store
October 21 – December 4, 2010
Press Release
New York, New York - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Caporael in this, her third exhibition based on a series of road trips through America. Suzanne Caporael: The Memory Store, opens on October 21st and will be on view until December 4th. A public reception will take place on Oct. 21, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The artist will be present.
Congruent with an ongoing study of visual cognition and recollection, Caporael has traveled over 30,000 miles of American roads in order to expose herself to the revelations and experiences of the United States, a country she refers to as “an impenetrable abstraction.” On the back roads, memorial plastic wreaths abound, as do barely disguised missile silos, and signs for “Neapolitan Mastiffs,” “Flemish Giants” and “New Yorkies” (dogs, rabbits and puppies, respectively). A virgin pastoral landscape can, at any turn, explode into the aggressive splendor of a string of strip malls. Horses stand idle in pastures, Indians ride ATVs, and statues of Mary cavort with Disney’s Seven Dwarfs on front lawns. Caporael’s interest lies in what we make of what we see.
In reference to a previous series of paintings, Time, (2004-2006) Caporael quoted physicist J.T. Fraser: “Space is the vessel of time.” But as we know, time robs memory of the details. In The Memory Store the painter presents us with the sensation of futility and the pleasure of the effort to hold on to recollections. The spare arrangements and unrepentant ambiguity imply a procedural distance with purpose. The occasional “recognizable” shape or line prompt contemplation, while the paintings physical contradictions between hard edges and the subtle erosions of boundaries encourage the reassembly of the elements to the viewers own memory store.
News
Suzanne Caporael
The Memory Store
Art in America, March 2011
New York-based Caporael is an inveterate road tripper (having covered some 30,000 miles in her lifetime), and she used her most recent cross-country excursion as the basis for the 12 paintings on display here (all 2009 or ’10). Despite their highly abstract forms, the canvases, some of them fairly substantial in scale (the largest are 60 inches tall) and many with thickly painted surfaces, manage to convey Caporael’s journeys in a way that feels as fresh and honest as a lap-held diary.