Bringing the Street into the Gallery – By Eva Ponderose

Bringing the Street into the Gallery

By Eva Ponderose

 

 

 

 

Carol Caputo refuses the isolation of an artist’s studio. Her art isn’t just about the city – it literally brings the city into the fabric of the canvas. Unlike some city artists who use found objects, debris, and detritus as part of their work, Caputo uses her own motion to embrace the motion of the city. Exploring the city, she brings canvas and rags with her and rubs them against the interesting and varied textures of various locations. Her canvases show traces of tire tracks, tile patterns, metal grates, and other encountered surfaces. Her added layers of paint and pastel use her own artistry to mime the motion she finds outdoors. Her recent show at Broadway Gallery, Evidence in Motion, (473 Broadway, March 16th to April 3), defied the quite tranquility of a gallery space with her dynamic colors and large-scale and ambitious abstractions.

"The city is my mentor," Caputo said, "and my work is about random opportunities, adventures, and discoveries." Her work embraces the difficult task of capturing a city without using a postcard of a monument. In Street Study, the largest piece in the exhibition, the complicated layers of street rubbings and her own pastel additions create a dynamic composition. The markings range from small brush strokes to sweeping gestures with a scope that defied stasis. Light colors, pastel pale pinks, yellows, and blues juxtapose the harsh charcoal colored rubbings like a pretty young girl in front of a jagged construction site. Her layered images capture the nuances of a city resisting any simple form of imagery. Perhaps only the motion of abstraction can capture the complications of gridded city life.

Caputo’s engagement with the city finds its art historical mentors in German and Russian Expressionism from the turn of the century. These artists also responded to the cityscape as it burgeoned in the postindustrial era. While time and art history have moved along, the city has only grown as a source of inspiration for writers and artists.

The rest of the works in the show take their dynamism from overlapping energies and uneven streets and sidewalks. In Lot 6062, Caputo starts with paper rubbings of manholes and tire tracks. Each layer of paint is carefully transcribed onto the framework of these basic patterns. The curving arches at the top right create dizzying motion that even the interruption of static rectangles cannot put to rest. Like illegible lines from a school notebook, the pages in Caputo’s painting hint at discarded lessons surviving only in an archived memory. But the artist’s city teaches us that we are more than just inhabitants of apartment squares through her use of bold blue tones and contrasting oranges that defy the drudgery of concrete and steel.

Exploring the city from inside, the Broadway Gallery exchange experience inside and outside by dissolving buildings’ walls as we dissolve our own preconceptions of both spaces. Caputo’s work challenges the very space it occupies and recreates the intersections of colliding forces.