Fish Hook as Metaphor: Yoan Capote’s Palangre
The solo show in New York - an interview
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.