Christian Capurro

Capurro's correction-fluid drawings emerged from an earlier series of ‘grafting’ works on paper, made during 1996–98.^[2] For these initial works, Capurro used Sellotape to lift sections of images depicting meat products, found in a junk-mail catalogue, grafting these impressions of flesh onto a page to create corporeal collages: part botanical, part mineral, part animal. The emptied catalogue pages became the impetus for the correction-fluid works, ‘which are additive as opposed to subtractive’;^[3] however, both suites contain the suggestion of uncertain, abstracted bodies.

The Gorgonia series references classical mythology: the monstrous Gorgon and the mortifying effect of gazing upon the face of the Medusa. Capurro employs correction fluid as a calcifying medium, a fluid that once deposited forms as a solid. With these pieces, Capurro has made what he refers to as ‘deathly white images’.^[4] The ambiguous arrangement of figures and the uncertain iconography of the works suggest intimacies or ‘couplings and grapplings’.^[5] The energetic lines and marks of the overdrawing register as molecular clusters, simultaneously suggesting desire and death. As Capurro observes, there’s a ‘tension between the “promise” of an intense or unbounded life (in the underlying commercial imagery) and the compromised fluidity of the petrified “Gorgonia figures” who are literally absorbed into space’.^[6]

Rigorous, critical and deeply informed, Capurro’s practice draws on his diverse interests spanning aesthetics, history of art, theory and popular visual culture. He has a long-standing interest in the drawings of idiosyncratic Belgian-born writer and artist Henri Michaux (1899–1984), known for his frenetic and intense drawings, often produced under the influence of hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline. Organic in form, Michaux’s intriguing, often-calligraphic sketches possess strange kinetic qualities that induce optical effects, his images appearing to simultaneously form and disintegrate before the eyes of the viewer.^[7] Michaux referred to them as ‘insatiable desires or knots of force, which [were] destined never to take form, here or elsewhere’.^[8]

Similarly fugitive and mysterious, Capurro’s Gorgonia series is animated by the dynamic contradiction between ‘realising an image and taking one away’.^[9] An important component of the artist’s continuously experimental practice, this elusive series betrays a fascination with bodies, reproduction and (mis)translation, and has its origins in the memory of photography.Capurro’s subtle and relentless acts of erasure and reproduction invoke the flow and passage of time and the ever-shifting interrelation between the forces of creation and destruction.

Melissa Keys is a writer and curator. She is currently curator at Buxton Contemporary at the University of Melbourne.