Carlos Capelán’s art is multi-levelled. With great versatility, he expresses that which is not easily expressed. A citizen of the world with roots in Uruguay, art studies in Sweden, he has worked and lived in many countries and in at least as many languages, and he has an unusually vast experience of seeing things from many angles. He has a reputation of being an outsider – but the question is, an outsider in relation to what? Where is the centre in today’s world, and how do we define the periphery? Carlos Capélan’s works are structured as language, not one but a multitude; he builds on an existing vocabulary while simultaneously expanding its boundaries. Entering one of his installations is like setting foot in a silent and dense zone, charged with activity and meaning, and at the same time his works elude every attempt of categorization and interpretation. Pluralism, the play of opposites, is present in his life as well as in his work: Latin America, the Nordic Countries, the physical and the intellectual, the rational and the emotional. Based in graphic art and drawing, he has composed and combined two-dimensional images with objects, partly covered with clay, added words and quotations on walls and objects, expanded the room as if he wants to draw the entire world. Graphic art and earth art all in one. But in a time when installations have become the lingua franca of art, he has moved towards more classical modes of expression, such as painting.
Carlos Capelán arbetar på många nivåer i sitt konstnärskap, han brukar ett rikt register för att ge uttryck för det som inte låter sig enkelt sägas. Som den världsmedborgare han är, med ett ursprung i Uruguay, konststudier i Sverige, verksamhet och liv i flera länder på minst lika många språk, har han en rik erfarenhet av att se saker och ting från fler håll än de flesta. Han har rykte om sig som outsider – frågan är i förhållande till vad. Var befinner sig idag centrum och hur definierar vi i så fall periferin? Carlos Capélans verk är strukturerade som språk, inte ett utan en mångfald, han bygger på den befintliga vokabulären men tänjer samtidigt dess gränser. Att träda in i en installation av honom är som att beträda en tyst och tät zon, laddad med aktivitet och mening, samtidigt undandrar hans verk sig försöken att kategorisera och tolka. Pluralismen, motsatsernas spel finns såväl i hans liv som i hans konst: Latinamerika och Norden, det fysiska och det intellektuella, det rationella och det känslomässiga. Med en grund i grafiken och teckningen har han komponerat samman tvådimensionella bilder med objekt, täckt delar med lera, adderat ord och citat på väggar och ting, expanderat rummet som om han önskat teckna hela världen. Grafik och jordkonst i ett, men i en tid då installationen blivit konstens latin, överallt gångbar, har han gått mot mer klassiska uttrycksmedel, som måleriet.
Ann-Sofi Noring, Chief curator, Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden
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Las obras de Carlos Capelán demandan una observación lenta, detenida. El resultado de ese gesto paciente, se traduce en las más diversas interpretaciones y perspectivas, en una piranesiana exploración de la fractura perceptiva. Pero este caleidoscopio hipertextual -siempre abierto a un número indeterminado de conclusiones de un virtual espectador- no implica una obra no calibrada, sino al contrario, se trata de una medida tensión que no debemos entender como forma acabada sino como obsesiva tentativa de dotar un sentido.
…Paul Ricoeur advierte como “el texto como un todo y como un todo singular puede compararse a un objeto, que puede ser visto desde varios lados, pero nunca desde todos los lados a la vez”. Carlos Capelán sabe que no todos veremos el texto de una misma manera, que existe cierto grado de imprevisibilidad, de deriva o turbulencia a la manera entendida por Michel Serres. Por eso otorga importancia a la experiencia, así como a su particular simbología.
David Barro, crítico de arte, España
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En una época en que triunfan simplificaciones, clichés, crispamientos identitarios y todo aquello que Serge Daney juntaba bajo la fórmula “gestión almacenera de la alteridad”, Carlos Capelán nos reconcilia con las paradojas y las sorpresas del laberinto cultural, como anteriormente Borges, Octavio Paz o Haroldo de Campos, esos “Bárbaros alejandrinos” que, “lejos de procurar romper con tradición alguna, han buscado reatar, unir todas las cosas”.
Catherine David, curadora francesa, directora de la VII Bienal de Dokumenta, Kassel, Alemania
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La obra de Capelán, y en especial sus ambientes e instalaciones, son como un chip que condensa muy diversos ejes culturales que se entrecruzan hoy en América Latina: el conceptualismo de incidencia social, la gráfica de tradición vernácula, la pintura de “atmósfera”, la crítica de la representación, el replanteo de la vieja neurosis de la identidad, la deconstrucción de los circuitos y mecanismos auráticos del arte y la cultura, un neotelurismo, el misticismo, las cosmovisiones no occidentales… para comentar a Capelán hay que hacer siempre ennumeraciones. Es significativo cómo su trabajo, a diferencia de otros artistas de la instalación contemporáneos, se reconoce dentro de la tradición visual latinoamericana. Esto responde a su imaginería tanto como a su barroquismo, y quizás a cierta dimensión intimista a pesar de la concentración en proposiciones de sesgo teórico, que provocan hacia el análisis social y cultural.
Gerardo Mosquera, co-fundador de la Bienal de la Habana, crítico de arte y curador del New Museum, New York, USA
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Capelán has, through his installations, drawings and paintings, chosen to show us the complexity of the culture in which we live, to view society from close up, and its art history from a slightly different position. The aesthetic qualities and the intellectual strategies he employs make clear that his work is not political in any strict sense. His installations, paintings and sculptures engage both the context and discourses of the art of our time. It questions and reformulates issues of identity race, religion and notions of language. His installations are special spaces which offer viewers entry into a highly complex world where geographic location is temporarily displaced and visual fantasy suspends time. Each installation beholds a multiplicity of visual and literary languages. Whether site or gallery specific, the space is set up to engage the viewers sensory responses. One is invited to think critically about the norms of politics, art, religion, philosophy, etc. The viewer’s critical inquiry opens a dialogue into the convoluted complexity of our contemporary world. A world where the cardinal points of the compass locate geographic position, instead of defining peoples and cultures, religious and political beliefs. A world no longer polarised into communism versus capitalism and the incommensurate cultural differences cannot simply be described by the term Globalism. The constellation of materials used in Capelán’s installations are designed to engage the audience in processes of thought, ritual and memory. The viewer is left to trust his or her instincts more than the apparent facts. One cannot explain either the individual work, or the installation as a whole, into any logical conclusion. The purpose is not to propose answers. Reading Capelán’s installation engages many senses in order to evaluate numerous theories and recall aspects of human existence which a too luxurious modernity allowed one to forget.
…Capelán’s exile began in Chile and later brought him to Sweden. This has made his vision a wonderful reciprocal mixture of the issues, strategies and languages of both regions. It also made memory an important factor in the scheme of his ideas. When political circumstance made exile more a matter of choice than one of health and safety, Capelán began to move throughout the parts of the world that he loved. For the past decade his nomadic travels have enabled him to leave traces of his vision in many countries. His strategy has been to show and to tell his viewers something about the world in which they are included. To read his work with the assumption that these installations are Latin American because the artist originates from there, is to expect its visual quotation to be framed by ethnography and exoticism. The work says something different. The visual quotation is not Latin American but European, so too are the ethnographic representations. When Capelán’s ideas centre on identity, his focus is not an essentialist representation of himself as a Uruguayan, as a member of a zone of humanity the hegemonic mainstream called Latin America. He has instead used both his worlds as resources, giving the art and objects found in the geographic space of Western Europe a revealing twist.
Gavin Jantjes, artist, curator, director of Capart, the Art Biennale at Cape Town, South Africa, writer and curator at the National Museum, Oslo, Norway
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Capelán’s system of work is that of counterpoint: his is a complex and contradictory aesthetic which defies definitions and establishes a contrast between what is physical with what is intellectual, the natural vs. the artificial, warmth with cold, what is new with what is old. He uses object-based resources (prints, framed painting, books), anthropological elements (earth, ashes), conceptual material (texts and maps), informative presentations (showcases), as well as purely aesthetic, poetic or conceptual elements, combined with reductive techniques (photocopying) and sensual formulations (unadorned painting of gesture and action). There is a sense of multiple presence and the work is conceived as the compatibility of things which are not compatible…
Pluralism unites all aspects of Capelán’s work. It defines a poetics in which intertwine the intellectual and the mystical (in an unusual mixture of idea art and religiousness), together with the rational and the emotional, the anthropological and the personal, the “primitive” and the scientific.
Germain Koh, a writer and a Canadian artist
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Every time Capelan announces the limit of a concept or the insufficiency of one model he is also invoking the question of sufficiency and need to take a step in another direction. There is no ultimate end. Each declaration of opposition is another form of entanglement with the opponent. Creativity never occurs in a social vacuum. All forms of artistic practice are structured like a language. The proliferation in forms of practice has also extended the need to multiply our codes of reference and our dexterity in cultural translation.
Nikos Papastergiadis, an Australian scholar and sociologist currently based in Melbourne, has written extensibly on contemporary art and colaborated in many international shows, among others the Sydney Biennale
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Buscando traspasar los límites del orden simbólico, el umbral de la escena de la representación, Capelán fuerza el lenguaje hasta su extremo, explora sus últimas márgenes, lo apremia para que devenga imagen, escritura, para que se abra hacia lo que tiene de indescifrable. Recordemos a Derrida cuando sostiene que leer supone el reconocimiento de un principio de ilegibilidad. Si el lenguaje no es capaz de transparentar sus significados, éstos deben ser perseguidos en las derivas errantes del signo, en sus extravíos y fallos, en sus silencios y entrelíneas.
Esta búsqueda se encuentra provista de un sentido ético y político: supone desconfiar de la omnipotencia del lenguaje, discutir su dirección única, desafiar el poder de sus códigos concertados. En esta dirección, Capelán apela a astutas artimañas para desestabilizar el significante y suscitar la proliferación del sentido. Estos ganchos buscan revertir el hueco que abre la representación: el vacío que deja lo omitido. El intento de sortear la imposibilidad de alcanzar lo real exige estrategias diversas que escapan del orden de la forma: “las cuestiones que cuentan”, dice Fabri, “más que sintácticas son tácticas”[1].
Seeking to trespass the limits of the symbolic order—the threshold of the scene of representation—Capelán forces language to its extreme, exploring its most remote margins, pressuring it to turn into image, writing, so that it opens up to that which is undecipherable in it. Derrida, let us not forget, maintained that reading meant acknowledging a principle of illegibility. If language is not capable of making its meanings transparent, then those meanings must be sought out in the wandering drifts of the sign, in its excesses and failures, in its silences and the spaces between.
This search harbors ethical and political meanings: it implies mistrusting language’s omnipresence, disputing its unidirectionality, challenging the power of its fixed codes. Toward this end, Capelán invokes cunning tricks in order to destabilize the signifier and provoke the proliferation of meaning. These hooks seek to revert the hollow opened up by representation: the emptiness left by what is missing. The attempt to outwit the impossibility of grasping the real requires diverse strategies that escape the grammar of form: “The questions which count,” says Fabri, “are tactical rather than syntactic.”
Ticio Escobar, curador, professor y crítico de arte paraguayo
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Carlos Capelans verk liknas med fördel vid texter, liksom att konstnären Carlos Capelan, i sin konstnärliga gärning, förestår och genomför ett slags skrivande. Inte bara för att ord, texter och andra språkliga element förekommer i hans konst. Vilket de förvisso gör. Inte bara för att hans konst är så att säga språkligt medveten, i det att den konsekvent relaterar till och förhåller sig till den moderna och den postmoderna konstens koder, begrepp, språkformer. Inte bara för det kalligrafiska uttrycket i hans teckningar. Utan kanske främst för att den konstnärliga handlingen, arbetsmetoden och skapandeprocessen hos Capelan så gärna associeras till ett skriftställarskap, till ett skrivande, till ett textuellt och ett intertextuellt arbete. I varje större installation eller utställning genomskrivs ett antal teman. I varje större arbete uppenbaras ord, meningar, språkformer, vilka i sin tur upprepas, förändras, förskjuts, omarbetas; motiv flätas in och ut ur varandra, en bildvokabulär preciseras, repeteras; en grammatik utprövas; propositioner poleras, fördelas. Enskilda verk – målningar, teckningar, skulpturer, objekt – som sätts samman till den större text varje enskild utställning eller installation är.
Jan Erik Lundström, Swedish curator, art critic and historian
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