Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce Proof, an exhibition of new paintings by Suzanne Caporael, on view 5 September through 26 October 2024. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Leslie Camhi and Stephen Westfall.

Proof, Suzanne Caporael’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, presents the artist’s latest exploration into the ambiguity of abstraction. The exhibition’s title sets the body of work within a mathematical framework—proofs, in their definition, are finite. Yet Caporael’s paintings pose more questions than answers: her shapes are unexacting with faded edges and hazily-rendered lines.

Caporael’s schematic subjects are set atop a seemingly uniform backdrop of an intangible gray color, yet, with a comparative lens, they reveal as undulating between warm and cool. “She fleshes out areas of shape or bands with flat color applied by brush, often wiping paint away from the ground where she doesn’t want it.  The wiping leaves an atmospheric film, a spare translucency that nests or imbeds the abstracted figures in a milky surround,” writes Stephen Westfall. The resulting paintings rely more heavily on personal intuition and association rather than fact of matter. 

The artist’s Bauhaus-inspired paintings of floating shapes and geometric systems are not only beautiful but cognitively stimulating. Caporael’s compositions are delicate yet assertive, alluring while allusive. Proof celebrates the existence of beauty in mathematics, and logic in art. The intellectually rich paintings revel in the art of human understanding and the power of multidisciplinary creativity in the pursuit of elegance and truth. 

Leslie Camhi writes, “In person, her works exert a remarkable presence, similar to a stage actor’s charisma. Yet the dramas her works enact—foldings, crossings, vibrations, levitations, all of these spatial operations played out within the confines of the canvas’s two dimensions—are far from momentary. The painted surfaces, as softly seductive as human skin, have been built up layer by layer over time, revealing their secrets slowly. Whatever is going on in them keeps us looking.”