Junior Borden Capalino’s newest collection of paintings, tentatively titled The Adventures of Rasmus Midgett, made a stunning appearance in Fisher the week before spring break. The artist’s second show in Fisher consisted of new paintings that he has been working on over the last six months. These paintings range from figurative representations to more abstract experiments with form and texture, but are never simply reduced to one or the other. The show had a coherent conceptual feel.
Capalino usually paints from random images he grabs out of magazines or off the internet. His interest lies mainly in images that capture a graphic style or visual trope that has been charged with some sort of cultural meaning.
One work has in its foreground the outline of a deer and a grinning, bearded hunter superimposed over a black and white color field infiltrated by shards of camouflaged canvas. The deer and hunter seem much more painterly and organic than the blurry black and white backdrop, which looks almost computer generated.
The show’s paintings repeatedly utilized layers of seemingly disparate visual styles or graphic clichés. This style stands out in another of the show’s pieces: a clean black and white composition that seems to suggest a stark horizon or landscape, but doubles back on itself and presents a canvas dominated by two minimalist forms. The painting is framed with a neon orange border of paint, which further denies a singular aesthetic purpose, allowing it to hover between any definitive reading or classification.
One of the larger works in the show was a nine panel painting that featured white forms, reminiscent of a close-up on a complicated schematic or diagram, set against an intense green background. The nine panels were all compositionally similar and seemed to point towards evolving combinations, a sort of permutation that altered itself slightly from panel to panel. Capalino believes this idea of recombining represents what he was trying to achieve in the paintings, a focus on how our readings and interpretations of art are shaped by both context and possibility.
“There is no sort of being-unto-itself in art,” Capalino said. His paintings could always point in new directions or have their meanings shift.
When one sorts out his or her experience with these paintings, one finds himself wading through the play of implications that this pastiche of styles initiates. Capalino sees the tropes he pits against each other as all “specifically stylized…and all analysis or engagement with it is in relation to the fact that it is specifically stylized…beyond even trying to talk about different schools of art, it’s more about visual experience.”
When asked how calculated this creation of contrasting visual play is for him, Capalino shirked having any set formula for how he contrasts imagery. For him, whatever the interaction of these visual tropes may be gets played out in the painting process.
As he tries to recontextualize visual imagery, Capalino said he hopes his paintings point to something larger: how readings or visual experience can be molded, steered and redirected by the influence of graphic stylistics and the cultural baggage of images.
But the artist seems fully aware of his own participation in the creation of images, understanding self-consciousness to be an important aspect of what his art communicates. For Capalino, the paintings “deconstruct themselves…they always reduce themselves to paint.”