“A superfluity of Punchinellos grapple with a tree (newly cut, if the ax-wielding Punchinello at the left offers any clue). The converging crowd and the ceremonial accouterments in the foreground strongly suggest a festival is about to begin, commencing, perhaps, with the raising of a maypole. Whatever the goal of their efforts, the Punchinellos exhibit the earnest enthusiasm of unselfconscious children” (Domenico Tiepolo, The Punchinello Drawings, New York, 1986, p. 112)

NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present Cinabrese, an exhibition of new drawings by Beatrice Caracciolo. The show will be on view from March 8 – March 29 at 197 Tenth Avenue.

The drawings are at once reflexive and impulsive, organic and abstract, and emotionally primary, all attesting to the artist’s mastery of the gesture of mark making. Caracciolo’s source material for Cinabrese, a term for skin color in early Renaissance painting in Florence, is one of the 103 drawings by Domenico Tiepolo that constitute his Divertimento per li regazzi, illustrating the life and times of Punchinello. Through expressive movements executed with pigment and collage, Caracciolo explores and expands upon the dramatic moment just before the Punchinellos chop the tree down. A focus on the tension preceding the action, rather than the actual event, is manifested in the artist’s spontaneous yet carefully considered lines and strokes, which succumb to a desire for truth and immediacy as the viewer is encouraged to abandon the notion of a single, fixed image.

Much like the entire series of works by Tiepolo, the drawings included in Cinabrese explore the almost unlimited potential for pictorial invention, and achieve something lasting and extraordinary not through the grand medium of oil on canvas, but through the more modest materials of paper, pigment, graphite, and ink. Spontaneous yet strongly willed, Caracciolo’s lines evoke a remarkable mixture of decomposition and energy, and the controlled and uninhibited.

Beatrice Caracciolo is an Italian artist based in Paris. In 2013 she was the subject of two one-person exhibitions, Attraversare Il Fuoco at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris and Battaglia at the Paula Cooper Gallery. In 2012 her work was exhibited at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France. In 2010, Caracciolo’s work was the subject of a one-person exhibition Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici. Her series of drawings Life Lines was shown at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia in 2002.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com