Beatrice Caracciolo — Terra d’ombra — Almine Rech Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 3 → April 7, 2012

Almine Rech presents Beatrice Caracciolo’s Terra d’ombra, an exhibition of recent works, including photographs, drawings, paintings and 2-dimensional sculptures made out of zinc. All works testify to the artist’s preoccupation with space, ways of defining and reclaiming territory—an affirmation of the gestural impulse underlying art-making. Caracciolo’s language is first and foremost expressive and gestural, following in the footsteps of those artists who emerged in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, both in Europe and America. She has also learned the lessons of Minimalism, which advocates for occasional restraint and greater poise and discipline. Beyond this lineage, her work is permeated by a highly developed sense of materials and textures.

For the past decade, Beatrice Caracciolo has experimented with a variety of materials, starting with her trademark charcoal drawings in which collaged elements often come to the fore. She has developed a series of works in zinc, a medium which bears witness to the passage of time. Of greyish appearance—the colour of time gathered—the recycled zinc used by the artist is the product of chemical reactions provoked by its exposure to natural elements. In Caracciolo’s zinc sculptures, different greys coexist, the outcome of the artist gathering a variety of pieces, each suffused with its own markings and coloration. Each fragment bears a different imprint, the result of erosion by the joint action of windsewpt rain and humidity. Here and there lines of fracture appear—fragments of metal not perfectly aligned, but juxtaposed in a seemingly commonplace manner—roughness and refinement reconciled.

Beatrice Caracciolo’s work is evocative of areas of fluctuation between solid and fluid states of matter, perhaps as a way of declaring her obsession with the quasi—alchemical processes. It points to the fact that her work is very much concerned with ways to depict displacements of energy. Ultimately we realise that the gesture underlying the construction of the zinc pieces is directly related to that of her charcoal drawings; the trajectory of lines defined by various overlapping fragments of zinc can be assimilated to lines “etched” in space. In her trademark large drawings, superimposed, overlapping and disseminated traces of various lines all testify to a complex interaction between conscious thought and the effects of chance and the unforeseen.

The show at Galerie Almine Rech will run concurrently to an exhibition of the artist’s works, entitled …pour que passe enfin mon torrent d’anges at the Chateau de Haroué (Lorraine).

Beatrice Caracciolo was born in Brazil and raised in Italy. She studied in New York at NYU and Columbia University, before pursuing an art curriculum at the New York Studio School. She has had numerous exhibitions of her works in the USA and Europe since the Nineties —most recently an exhibition of her prints and photogravures at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York— and was the subject of a retrospective at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2010. She lives and works in Paris.