Arte New
YOAN CAPOTE - ELEGY
"The sea in Cuba is both paradise and prison," says Yoan Capote (Pinar del Río, 1977) in the Roman venue of Galleria Continua, and the words seem to be sailing, trying to take to the sea on his marinas where waves and ripples are formed by illusionistic rows and thickets of fish hooks of different sizes, embossed on oil paint. These are works from the Isla series, the Cuban artist's best-known, exhibited, along with more recent ones, in Elegy, Capote's first solo show in Rome. At a distance, the effect is velvety, almost complacent; when you get closer, you feel a chill at the thickness of hooks that grab your gaze. Ready to take even the body of those who get too close.
Capote was born and raised near the great tobacco plantations, and he remembers the first time he saw the ocean, with childlike wonder. Then he realized that on the island, water is also enclosure and illusion, surveillance, escape route. He grew up during the economic crisis, the blockade, the hustle and bustle of Fidel Castro's regime. It has seen the dangerous migration, the "balseros" leaving (and leaving) by raft to Florida. In many cases never arriving. The title's elegy is for the dead as well as the survivors, those who made it across the treacherous sea. Capote's metallic marinas do not repel. They are ambivalent, fascinating and dangerous. Even when they have a religious afflatus, as in the Requiem series, in which the Cuban artist employs suggestions from his first trip to Italy: in one of the works in the exhibition, the dark hooks, the thickened blood make the gold-leaf section stand out, recalling fourteenth-century altarpieces. But the work especially calls to mind the shipwrecks of barges overloaded with migrants in the Mediterranean. In the center of one of the two rooms, the installation Drift instills dizziness: a wooden rudder rests on two blocks of marble at different heights, reminiscent of a lurching boat; but it also seems to crash to the ground like some sort of execution axe. In the other one you are likely to stumble upon a scythe that is not that of the communist flags, industrious and promising and perhaps deceptive, but the long-handled instrument of the old woman, riding on one of the steeds of the Apocalypse: it is titled Presagio.
On the walls are some of Capote's latest works, from the Purification series, textural and graphic at the same time: traces of metal taken from barbed wire and handcuffs, worked and dipped in plaster, once again drawing seascapes, this time white and iridescent. A few nail heads are glimpsed in the plaster, just so as not to forget the hardness.
The effect is not distressing, it has the iridescent beauty of the world's seas, the harshness of fishermen's lives (will the hooks be used to fish out the souls of migrants, of fugitives?), the anxieties of island-prisons and tempting horizons. Finally, Santiago, the Hemingwayan hero of The Old Man and the Sea, comes to mind, a Cuban fisherman precisely: with his hooks, his hunger, his illusions. Heminguay loved Cuba with its contradictions. Capote loves them and represents them with skill and force. He makes them universal. Capote knows Hemingway's novels, as do many Cubans. The hooks of his sea may intimidate, catch illusions. But they do not discourage. As with the big marlin hooked by Santiago and devoured by sharks before the boat touches land. There are winners who catch nothing. But the old fisherman at the end of the story dreamed of lions. If they make one dream of anything, Capote's unusual and hooking seascapes, with all the pitfalls and harshness, make one dream of freedom.
Galleria CONTINUA
The St Regis Hotel - Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, 3, 00185 - Rome – Italy
Sept 29th – Dec 3rd, 2022
