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Ceci n’est pas un video. This is not a video. No,
this is not a video; it is a series of colour photographs arranged
in two rows of eight image sequences, totalling 48 photographs.
Each image is accompanied by a text fragment in English; the words
are mounted as movie captions. But the images do not move; they
are still, enigmatic.
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.
In Ceci n’est pas un video he shows, for the first time, a work
based on photography. The visual and conceptual dimensions are always
present in Carlos Capelán’s works. The installation embraces us,
lulls us into an almost ritualistic atmosphere, while simultaneously
moving us away from the reassuring comfort of the central perspective
by means of the many cross-connections that arise in his room. It
is an intricate web of meaning, where fragments appear to those
who move around and raise their eyes above the obvious. Wedged into
Moderna Museet’s collection display we find Carlos Capelán’s pictorial
suite, with a title that is a direct nod to the surrealist René
Magritte, who painted the work Ceci n’est pas une pipe. No, it was
not a pipe, as implied by the subject; it was - and is - a painting.
At first, Ceci n’est pas un video appears to be 48 film stills,
but it is not a film, it is stills taken with a digital camera.
It is probable that the images were taken on the move by Carlos
Capelán himself, perhaps leaving for or returning from his assignments
of teaching students who all want to work with video, or perhaps
taken on his way to one of the many biennials where video is the
predominate medium. The work’s subtitle is “do natives have a soul”,
a question that undermines the ground ever further for too unambiguous
interpretations. The subjects are mainly taken from airports, airplanes,
runways and air spaces. In this no-man’s-land, far beyond the heaviness
and darkness of exile, the natives have no place. No one belongs
here, everything is in limbo. Carlos Capelán has interspersed his
work with close-ups of pieces of raw meat, pizzas, and slices of
sausages, presented with a distance equal to that covered by the
flight. Each image is duplicated. As with Siamese twins, the subject
is mirrored in itself, within the same frame. In a recent series
of works, Capelán has explored the condition of jet lag; the state
of weightlessness when the body is displaced, even though one knows
that one is in one’s body. A common condition at the beginning of
a new millennium.
Do you love me? Do you really love? it says on some of the captions
with which Carlos Capelán has punctuated his images. Fuck off! is
another succinct expression, but what it refers to is not immediately
apparent. Many flight themes have longer captions in the manner
of quotations from a book one ought to have read. “Content arising
from the work’s relationship with art history” - yes, to a certain
extent the reference to Magritte is expressive of the pictorial
suite as a whole, but in the complex web that Carlos Capelán spins
around us, it is only one of several possibilities. A structural
and linguistic pluralism, everything is not possible, but most things
are. Up to a point his works may be characterized as rhetorical,
packed with statements, but the short circuits are innumerable and
new meanings arise. It is like a film where the captions are out
of sync and preferential rights of interpretation no longer exist,
as life itself, for real, absurd, impossible, and fantastical. On
a faceted image the artist pulls his suitcase back and forth with
a text saying: “Visual perception can be altered while the object
itself remains unaltered.” Everything depends on one’s chosen point
of view.
Carlos Capelán once said that he wants to be a warm conceptual artist
and a cold expressionist. The genre of portraiture has been a strong
Western pictorial tradition, but instead of making portraits he
chose, early on, to draw headless, multiplied bodies. Throughout
his career he has used quotations from different cultures, texts
and signs, first in ink, and later drawn in ethereal fluids such
as Coca-Cola, breast milk and wine. He is opposed to reduction and
the aspiration towards simplified structures, characteristic of
an old, colonial tradition. Instead he affirms plurality and polyphony.
Multilingualness, where languages are seen as living organisms and
the realization that the perfect translation does not exist – but
in order to communicate we have to accept imperfection. Carlos Capelán
places viewers in situations that encourage them to make their own
decisions. Stay solid. Dematerialisation. Spatially, Ceci n’est
pas un video is wedged into the museum collection and from the periphery
the work poses questions to the museum as a whole.
Ann-Sofi Noring
translation: Hans Olsson
Text information
Text for the exhibition folder, Den 1a på Moderna: Carlos Capelán
- Ceci n'est pas un video, Moderna museet, Stockholm, Sweden,
2004. (back
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