Images
Duke it Out in Student Art Show
by Steven Villereal
Junior
Borden Capalinos newest collection of paintings, tentatively
titled The Adventures of Rasmus Midgett, made a stunning appearance
in Fisher the week before spring break. The artists 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 shows paintings repeatedly utilized layers of seemingly
disparate visual styles or graphic clichés. This style stands
out in another of the shows 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, its 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.
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