Tony Capellan at the Trienal of Santo Domingo
While I roamed the halls of the Museo de Arte Moderno of Santo Domingo, I remembered an installation exposition of Tony Capellan in this museum in the late 90s. Tony was already a legendary figure of Dominican young art. Winner of the principal competitions and local biennials, in different categories and artistic manifestations, Capellan moved within the waters of the Povera art and a Caribbean syncretism filled with symbols and signs of the past and the present…I was so fascinated when I saw those works that I wrote an article for the newspaper in which I occasionally collaborated with. Especially, that airplane created with wasted was instilled into my memory…but I never published it.
Today, Tony continues being that young artist, although his art has matured with that inclemency of the Antillean sun, and like aforetime, dressed with his shorts and some millennial hat, walks by the ocean shores looking for objects that his fertile imagination transforms in his visual verses and poem from abandonment.
The waves still bring waste from the consumer society, and Capellas -like a new kind of Quixote- transforms windmills into giants, in metaphors of the problems in misery, the abandonment and of hope, recollecting childhood memories that have died, of illuminated trips that navigated the blue marine, of yawls that never reached their destiny and that returned to the coasts made scraps of melancholy.
A maritime rope of some stranded boat, remains of childrens’ toys that saw their infancy and innocence leave, legs and arms are together in a spiral, like the takings of the whirlpool and the wind, like the rubber sandals that stayed as mute witnesses of the goodbye forever, of the cavalry of the drowned immigrants, just like the round house and details of a little tree of plastic colors, that seem to arise like the ivy, of an unpolluted white mural and seems to scatter like the cry of a baby without dreams. Everything reminds us of how fleeting and fragile life is, like smoke scrolls that rise and slip in the air. Meanwhile, the waves ontinue coming and going, just like thoughts…
