The Brooklyn Rail

Ernest Caramelle is quiet in his gestures, which are expansive in their resonance. On the top floor of Ernst Caramelle: two dots one line at the Austrian Cultural Forum, his 2007 video work, horizontal split, distills this approach. Two shifting horizontal bars of color frame a view of a Manhattan street, where passersby drift in and out of sight. The work is mesmerizing in its simplicity—an experiment in rhythm, perception, and chance. Watching, I found myself urging the pedestrians to walk faster or slower, wondering who they were, where they were going. In this way, the piece collapses abstraction and everyday life, transforming an ordinary scene into an open-ended meditation.

This type of interplay has come to define Caramelle’s practice. A conceptual artist with an affinity for the provisional, he has worked in video, experimental works on paper, ephemeral pieces that engage the sun, wall paintings, and gesso objects for over five decades. His teachings, lectures, and his art consistently pose the question “What is art?”, while enlisting viewers as active participants in shaping meaning. Geometry, transparency, and vivid color recur throughout his oeuvre, always in service of broader explorations of perception, process, and transformation. For Caramelle, art is never hermetic, but something that hovers between idea and form, content and experience.

Caramelle’s early training in stained glass resonates in the clarity and precision of his forms, as well as in his attention to how light, transparency, and layering affect perception. His compositions often function like shifting architectural diagrams, where planes overlap and edges float, creating spaces that feel both constructed and unstable. This informs not only his site-specific installations, but also his paintings, gesso works, and videos, giving each piece a sense of spatial dynamism that draws the viewer into an active engagement with both form and context.

This spirit of openness extends to his untitled, site-specific wall installation, made from watercolor, plaster, and colored paper. Spanning all three floors, the work responds to the building’s distinctive verticality with crisp and playful geometric forms: two red paper triangles suggest eyes, a line of plaster tubes forms a mouth, and murky green watercolor triangles on the sides bring the composition together. This non-expressive face resonates with Caramelle’s long-standing interest in how simple geometry can become something more. Like the exhibition’s title, two dots one line, minimal forms evoke a face—a reminder of how abstraction and everyday perception constantly overlap in his work.

As with his earlier wall paintings, the materials emphasize impermanence: watercolor could wash away, paper could crumple or fade. The fragility of these components underscores Caramelle’s ongoing fascination with ephemerality and transformation. And this sensibility extends throughout the exhibition. In a suite of untitled abstract paintings, blocks of watercolor and acrylic flatten into architectural shapes, suggesting spaces that are legible yet uninhabitable. In one work from 2023, a cart stacked with catalogues carries its own abstract composition—a red square set against a yellow, L-shaped form—collapsing the two dimensional forms into the quotidian, and the everyday into art.

The most concentrated example appears in grip (2019), a small gesso and graphite panel where blocky pink L-shapes float within a larger green-and-black L, distilling Caramelle’s language of forms into something at once austere and playful. Across these works, geometry never seems to just be geometry; it hovers between abstraction and recognition, structure and chance, concept and experience. Together, these works show how Caramelle consistently transforms modest means into expansive contemplation—works that resist closure, implicate their surroundings, and invite the viewer into an open field of awareness.