_Bio Pascal Caputo was born in Montreal and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual and media art from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He rounded out this training at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2005. His work has been exhibited in several exhibitions and renowned contemporary art fairs in Quebec and the rest of Canada, including at Papier, Art Toronto and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Several of his works are held in private collections in Canada.
_Approach Caputo’s paintings, turning around various contemporary issues concerning the image, such as banality, multiplicity, representation, identity and obsolescence, translate photography and its digital manipulations into pictorial representation. For example, he adapts images from social media, which he cuts up and whose human figures he replaces with unpainted areas. The singularity of the works which come out of this technique lies in the constant tension they generate, the result of an extreme relationship between empty and full. When observed by the viewer, the empty zones replacing the faces are transformed: as failed identities, they become spaces of possibilities, engaging the viewer’s imagination in a process of projection and identification.
_Project Caputo’s project Obscuration, conceived under the sign of today’s identity revolution and its representation, will be made up of a series of painted portraits without figures onto which spectators will be led to project themselves through post-identity thinking. Caputo will digitally cut the subjects out of photographs found online before transforming the remaining bits and pieces and peripheries of the altered photographs into impasto. The cut-out forms, transferred to human scale, will simultaneously embody the presence of an absence and the absence of a presence by means of a (de)figuring action. (De)personified in this manner, the empty trimmed spaces in Caputo’s paintings will represent a radical gesture of obliteration, censorship and even cancellation.
Photo credit: courtesy of the artist
