Harder than finding the painting I am going to do, “Caio Fonseca said in a recent interview, “is deciding what painting I am not going to do.”
It’s a puzzling statement from a painter whose work seems, at least at first acquaintance, to be triggered wholly by informed intuition and made without prior decisions.
The ambiguous, colored shapes that float across the surfaces of Fonseca’s canvases and works on paper resist identification, as if pulled directly from the unconscious.
They also refuse to settle down spatially; unnamable, but richly associative, they pulse between figure and ground, now appearing nearly submerged by creamy expanses of paint, now breaking free to hover in fictive space.
These apparently unpremeditated, albeit rigorously ordered, paintings always read as the product of accretion, which makes Fonseca’s comment about refusal and denial somewhat surprising. Yet longer acquaintance with his work of the past few years makes it clear that his emphasis on rejecting possibilies is very real.
Since about 2000, Fonseca’s process could, in fact, be characterized not simply as “finding the painting” but as creating as open-ended set of visual possibilities and then gradually destroying all of the roads not taken.
Painting a Paradox by Karen Wilken, Art in America
http://www.caiofonseca.com
