Fish Hook as Metaphor: Yoan Capote’s Palangre

Earlier this week, we dropped in on the installation of Yoan Capote: Palangre, an exhibition of recent paintings embedded with thousands of fish hooks. The show features two series: Isla, a series of seascapes, and the more abstract Palangre—the Spanish term for a trawl line hung with hundreds of fish hooks. Capote walked through the show with us, in a conversation that ranged from Romantic painters to Cubans’ relationship to the sea.

You’ve been doing these fish hook paintings for a while. When did you start?

I think it was around 2006. I did the [first] major pieces in 2010. But the idea of working with fish hooks and making paintings of the sea—all of that was very old, from the time I was a student.

How would you describe these works? Are they paintings? Hanging sculptures?

Both. In this kind of works I combine knowledge and solutions of both painting and sculpture, and even printmaking. It’s painting when you get near and see the brush strokes and the oil paint, but from a distance it looks like a graphic image. I’m inspired by the graphic images of the sea that I do. Then, in certain moments as you get nearer, it’s like a sculpture.

The sensorial experience, in front of the metal elements, is important, since these series are inspired by the term “iron curtain.” For Cubans, the sea is a kind of wall.

This is your third show at Jack Shainman Gallery.

This is the show that I always wanted to make with Jack. The thing is, to make all the paintings needs a lot of time.

All the horizon lines are at the same height. It’s like each painting represents a moment in a day—a moment of light, and an emotional moment too. The sea is very connected to the emotions.

There are references here from symbolism and 19th-century painters and the way they try to relate the representation of landscape and nature itself with human psychological or emotional experience.In this series I go more deeply into art history, generally of the seascape. I see it connecting not only with the Cuban experience but with art history itself. Some of the paintings are inspired by Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner.

The works have subtitles, always. This piece is named Isla (After Böcklin). Böcklin was a major Symbolist painter, who did an iconic work called Isle of the Dead. He actually did a lot of versions of that painting. It’s about bringing spirits to the Island of the Dead. A very mystical painting.

In my work, you see only the sea. It’s as if the spectator is situated on Böcklin’s island. All the death and drama are connected in symbolic ways, as an allegory of the Cuban experience—all the people who die [on the water]. The fish hooks are symbols of seduction and traps.

There wasn’t much color in the earlier fish hook paintings, but it seems to be an important element here.

The previous ones were more about the experience of the object itself. I think the first ones were conceived more as sculptures. I realized that oil painting had other kinds of possibilities. Color itself has a lot of psychological possibilities.

Read the whole interview, originally published in Cuban Art News