Paula Cooper

BEATRICE CARACCIOLO
Il Bosco Lontano
6 January – 3 February 2018

NEW YORK — Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of new drawings and mixed-media paintings by Beatrice Caracciolo. The exhibition, titled Il Bosco Lontano, is the artist’s fourth with the gallery and will be on view at 521 West 21st Street from January 6th through February 3rd, 2018. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on Saturday, January 6th.

“Blunt marks wrestle themselves free. These marks hold down the surface like paperweights, indeterminate, turning in on themselves, splitting, moving around the back and through to the other side, wrestling to hold a form in space. Grubby grounds, oily and worked. Roughed up. The rubble is transformed into light. The form is born, ancient activity right out of Fayum portraiture. Each drawing an actively found place. So conscientious.”1

— George Negroponte on Beatrice Caracciolo

For her new series of works, Caracciolo deftly expands upon her mastery of line using a breadth of techniques and materials including pigment, tempera, graphite, water soluble chalk, crayon and paper collage. Alternately working from an image, from real life, or from her imagination, the works present scenes of nature, abstracted through Caracciolo’s forceful yet delicate marks. Of note is a triptych entitled Il Bosco Lontano, whose layers of smoky washes and sharp kinetic scratches convey the atmospheric depth and diversity of a faraway forest. Other series, including Aghi di Pino and Fiori, illustrate a more reductive application of gesture yet brim with vitality and a keen sensitivity to space. Here a flower or pine needle is evoked in abbreviated contours that pulse and dissolve across the picture plane.

Beatrice Caracciolo (b. 1955, São Paulo, Brazil) is an Italian artist based in Paris. Recent one-person exhibitions include Créer en soi le dragon de feu at the Temple Collection in Beijing (2016); Attraversare Il Fuoco at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris (2013); Battaglia at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013); ... pour que passe enfin mon torrent d’anges, at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France (2012); Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2010); Life Lines at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2002). Caracciolo has participated in several group exhibitions including at Casa de Santa Maria, Cascais, Portugal (2017); Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna, Austria (2014); Waddesdon Manor, UK (2012); Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France (2012); the Festival dei Due Mondi Spoleto, Spoleto, Italy (2010 and 2008); and Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC (2002).

George Negroponte, “Beatrice Caracciolo,” BOMB Magazine (April 1, 2000)