The Brooklyn Rail

Painting is remarkable in its capacity for capturing a wide range of temporalities—from the breath of an instant to the unfolding of minutes, days, or even years. Time comes not just from the making of a painting, but also (perhaps more importantly) in one’s experience of it, which might seem anything from fleeting to eternal. Mariel Capanna’s current installation of three newly-commissioned works at the Clark Art Institute sensitively curated by Robert Wiesenberger, partake of these various temporalities as the exhibition’s subtitle, Giornata, elegantly implies.

Capanna’s first solo museum exhibition—to be followed next year by a more expansive survey at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art—initially seems to be the case of less being more. But there is just so much more than expected—in form, material, and meaning—as the surfaces of her three paintings beckon a closer look, and as a result, a newer and fuller experience. One brightly-colored, three-sided fresco and two wistful and atmospheric oil paintings with muted but sprightly delineations of impasto in oil, wax, and marble dust have been installed with great care and consideration in two site-specific locations in Clark’s campus. Both the fresco and oil paintings (although in their own divergent ways) are less representative of a condition of either/or than they are of both/and, suspended somewhere between now and then, here and there, density and sparseness, abstraction and representation, generation and loss. These works reward multiple viewings, especially at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions, which demonstrate how wonderfully unstable and precarious viewing them can be and how responsive these works are to the architecture of their surroundings.

Like Capanna’s fresco, Wall Painting with Child (2025) at the Manton Research Center, the two oil paintings are explicitly connected to their sites. Installed on the lower level of Tadao Ando’s newest wing at the Clark, the vertical painting, Goose, Fruit, Awning, Arm (2024), is hung against the Japanese architect’s soft, fine-grained concrete, while the other, Tulip, Faucet, Candles, Cat (2024), horizontally spans a wall of reddish-orange granite, whose variegated palette seems to make its way into the painting itself. At different times of day, the paintings pick up different casts and hues, and depending on the mood of the crowd and the general ambience of the room, the paintings can feel very different—more playful or more serious.

Capanna’s imagery is much more spartan than in the past and contrasting ever less with the muted atmospheric grounds. This derives from Capanna’s urge to capture the experience of fleeting images, such as those seen in home movies or slideshows of family photographs. Viewers are left with visual and material impressions, fragments, exploded like confetti and filtered by her hand and eye—not faithful renderings of events past. The artist explains that her previous preference for more saturated and contrasting colors eventually gave way to gentle gradations whose overall palette she folded back into the overlaid imagery, thereby carrying the misty atmospheric quality across the entire field, bringing form closer to ground. Titles for these two oil/wax/marble dust works—almost in direct contrast with the fragmentation of the imagery—explicitly invoke some of the depicted subject matter: i.e., goose, fruit, faucet, etc.

Still worried the overlaid lines and images in these two new oil paintings carried too commanding a color profile, Capanna went and toned them down even further. There is a certain delight in finding an errant bright orange, or occasional wispy rainbow. In addition to being desaturated, their visual structure appears more fragmentary than ever before, resembling parts of limbs or twisted coat-hangers with spindle-backed armchairs, which squiggle and shimmer amidst Ed Ruscha-esque backgrounds like amoebas sandwiched between glass slides. The crushed marble dust mixed into the oil and wax impasto catches and disperses light, while alternately casting shadows, complementing a wide-range of surface effects already at play. Capanna’s subtle impasto, which is more visible at a glancing view, is rewarded by her peculiar mark-making, reminiscent of Terry Winters’s controlled chaos.

In an alternate way, Capanna’s fresco inverts the field of play. Installed in the main reading room of the 1973 Manton Research Center, originally designed by Pietro Belluschi and The Architects Collaborative and recently refurbished by Selldorf Architects, the work wedges itself into a ground floor window bay separating the main reading room and atrium from the library shelving on the other side, while still leaving more than half of the window usable—a curious and yet welcome intrusion into an otherwise everyday scene. While the two oil paintings blend into their surroundings, reflecting and refracting them, this fresco boldly and playfully threatens to overtake the architecture. One wishes there were more of these fresco panels, perhaps one in each of the three horizontal window bays.

In contrast with Capanna’s oil paintings, the entire fresco is boldly colored and crisply composed, depicting a fragmentary image of the artist and her young son in a tender embrace, a flat image wrapped around the fresco’s three sides. Giornata, the subtitle of the exhibition, relates to the term in fresco describing the amount of work to be completed in a single day, which directly corresponds with a physical patch of prepared wall which was to be painted in that period of time. In this way, time is more explicitly inscribed in the sandy surfaces of these frescos, but just as with the oil paintings, it becomes harder to untangle the longer one looks at them. How long did they really take to make? Which patch of color was made during which day? How long might I continue looking at them? How big are the individual marks she made, and how many were completed in a single day of work? The closer one looks at the fresco, the more variegated the saturated patches of color become. Nothing is as it initially appeared to be.