Galerie Leger, Malmö, Sweden, October/November 2020

All of It / From the Implosion Series
and
The Love Issue
Nine recent drawings on paper, ink and soil from the Dead Sea

“…Carlos Capelán’s paintings are motivated by an obliqued view of the world. These works depict the outlines of a figure, both as portraits and as a bodily form, against a patchwork of abstract squares and rectangles that have, in turn, been inspired by analytical cubism and geometric abstraction. These figures are like spectral images, and their multiple gazes are both towards the viewer and into an undefined distance. They are like ghosts or echoes from the past. Indeed, he has referred to the faces in his work as “stuttering portraits”. An enduring image in Capelán’s oeuvre is the anamorphic appearance, so that only an alternative perspective onto the picture can bring it back into proportion…”

“…Capelán’s new paintings are layered in the most complex ways, so that the picture plane is anything but flat as the jostle of abstract planes and figurative traces intersects across the canvas. These lines and traces are entangled, decentred, and fragmented. They seem to both dematerialised and rematerialised before our eyes. We can’t help but think of the tides of people on the move. …”

“…Entitled Implosion, this series of paintings may be seen as ametaphor for the contemporary experience of complexity. Modernism is imploding here, and by implication so too is the modernist art museum…”

Victoria Lynn
“The Tangible Trace”
TarraWarra Museum of Art
Australia, 2019