Painting a paradox

"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." (1) 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; unnameable, 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 possibilities is very real. "Inventions: Recent Paintings by Caio Fonseca," at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and a showing of new works at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, focused on mixed-medium canvases and gouaches on paper that could be described as being as much the result of "unpainting" and cancellation as of addition and accumulation. That seemingly curious response to the interviewer's question turns out to be perfectly accurate.

Since about 2000, Fonseca's process could, in fact, be characterized not simply as "finding the painting," but as creating an open-ended set of visual possibilities and then gradually destroying all of them but one, without entirely disguising the evidence of roads not taken. Recent pictures begin as checkerboards of clear color, broad swipes of liquid pigment, staccato stabs of the brush, swirls, stripes or blocks of unexpected hues. These beginnings can be symmetrical or eccentric, monochrome or polychrome, dense or sparse. They seem spontaneous, even playful, like a release of Dionysian exuberance. "Finding the painting" appears to consist of disciplining these unruly initial impulses, not by selecting particular configurations at the expense of others, but by forcing them to conform to new rhythms and to coexist with a new order of shapes created by canceling out large areas of the first image.

To do so, Fonseca deploys expanses of single hues--radiant off-whites, celestial blues, mysterious brown-blacks--to carve out firm-edged, billowing shapes that become the protagonists of the final image. There's a good deal more to it; he adds--or possibly re-excavates--small elements, which function as accents, shifting the scale of the final image and adding complexity to the space, while he also often enriches the surface of the overpainting. The paradox is that Fonseca describes the generating, deceptively unfettered part of the painting as "the most considered, most concentrated stage," during which he is preternaturally aware of implicit and explicit relationships among the painterly and chromatic incidents to which he will later be reacting. His seemingly rational "editing," as he calls it, and the transformation of his first campaign is, by contrast, a wholly intuitive process--"like sliding down a slippery slope"--of releasing forms and shapes generated by his hard-won sense of the innate order of the world around him. (2)

In the best of Fonseca's recent works, such as the luminous Pietrasanta Painting C04.26 (2004) at Kasmin or the darkly glowing Fifth Street Painting C04.16 (2004) at the Corcoran, these gently swelling shapes seem to be at once airborne planes and interruptions in an expanse of paint. They declare themselves first as assertive presences within or in front of a confrontational wall of color, punctuated by small flicks and twists. But as we look, they become windows in that wall, allowing us to see into a loosely gridded atmospheric space that exists beyond the surface of the canvas; then we are returned to the literal expanse of painted canvas once again. In the gouaches, where paint handling can be even freer than in the canvases, and the contrast between delicate, wristy marks and broad strokes can be even more acute, these spatial shifts are often particularly intense. When relationships between color passages are too evident or swoops of paint reconnect themselves too visibly through the windows," the paintings seem less convincing, but Fonseca is a severe enough critic of his own work that such pictures usually don't survive.

It's perhaps not fanciful to interpret Fonseca's paintings of this type as metaphorical comments on his own history or emblems of his complex cultural legacy. He was born not merely into a family of artists but into an entire tradition. His father, the acclaimed sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca, a student of the pioneer modernist Joaquin Torres-Garcia, was steeped in the Taller Torres-Garcia esthetic of harmony and economy, its celebration of the beauty of simple materials and its near-Platonic awareness of an underlying ideal abstract order of the world. Caio, in turn, studied with Augusto Torres, Joaquin's oldest son and a product, like Gonzalo, of the Taller's discipline. Caio never adopted the Taller's symbolic imagery, its culti vated primitivism or its earthy palette, yet its fundamental principles of revealing the pure harmonious abstractness of our surroundings, in nonliteral ways, continue to inform his work. If we read the freewheeling "secret paintings" with which Caio Fonseca begins his recent works as a kind of rebellion against his formation, then the selective cancellation of those initial declarations to turn them into lucid, expressive images could be interpreted not only as "finding the painting" or rejecting the painting he doesn't wish to make, but also as revealing his deeply held conviction that our ordinary, perceivable world tenuously masks a timeless abstract world of order and harmony. Apollo, it seems, triumphs. Yet the fact that the process of superimposition permits views into an imperfectly suppressed Dionysian world suggests that the rambunctious god is not entirely vanquished. The time-honored tension between the two extremes animates Fonseca's paintings and lends them an enriching ambiguity. Things may not be what they seem--which is altogether a good thing.