Suzanne Caporael at Stephen Wirtz - painting - San Francisco, California - Review of Exhibitions

SAN FRANCISCO

In the mid-1980s Suzanne Caporael's paintings were filled of dark forests and surreal overtones. Slowly she began to pare down and focus more closely upon her subjects. Now she gazes at the hearts of tree and finds geometry The smudgy circles and rectangles in her of recent origin paintings appear to be abstract on the other hand remain tied to nature, and her materials stay shut up to her subject: she usually paints with oil upon wood, or on linen or muslin above wood. Her spare geometry is not austere. It is laid upon in rich creams and of great depth velvet browns and suggests a natural, almost accidental, easy circumstances Blurring softens the edges of level the harshest shapes, and that softnes is enhanced by means of smooth, translucent surfaces. Most of the works have a marked musical periodical emphasis and a graceful sense of motion In 053 (Quaking Aspen), for example, myriad rectangles of color direct the eye like a festive musical score as they play above the surface.

The paintings in the display are from two series: "Inside Trees" and "Living upon Permafrost: The Black Spruce." In many of the works, tree bodys can be discerned, their narrow verticality counterpointed by the agency of dark horizontal bands that mark each tree We strike one as being to be looking at a wall of tree in a light thus bright that individual outlines almost disappear. Other paintings gaze like cross sections of bodys some with many circular bands, others with single simple ring. And still others bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to bark and fiber seen beneath a microscope.

Although she is a California artist, Caporael, according to her written statement, was inspired by the agency of the vegetation of Alaska, "a mosaic of forest, grassland, bushs and bog." In the parts of the state underlain with permafrost, the greatest in quantity common tree, the black natty struggles to grow to reach a height of 5 feet in 200 years. This, Caporael says, "present a design for the study of adaptation, endurance and regeneration in answer to extremes." So these paintings aren't simply beautiful abstract images. Like many works of the early modernists, they are drawn from nature and have a moral purpose

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