ART REVIEW : CAPORAEL MYSTERIES AT NEWPORT

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has taken responsibility for introducing Suzanne Caporael’s paintings in what curator Paul Schimmel calls “one of the most exciting, nerve-racking and courageous acts a museum can undertake.” A dozen of her darkly romantic oils that brood over humankind’s relationship with nature are on view here through Jan. 27.

This sort of “act” sharply divides the art community between those who believe that museums should serve as final validating authorities and those who think that they should support and promote young talent. Such battle lines become fuzzy when the museum in question is dedicated to showing contemporary art. At Newport, boundaries grow fuzzier still because the museum has established a pattern of showing the largely untried and not necessarily true in a series of exhibitions called “New California Artists.”

Even at Newport, Caporael’s grand entrance is a coup--but a very prickly one. By plunging into public view in a prestigious museum (a move most young artists only dream of), she has subjected herself to museum-level expectations of quality and maturity--and thus to harsher criticism than might apply to a first show in a local gallery. She weathers the exposure rather shakily, coming off as an interesting, serious, ambitious newcomer whose work suffers from arbitrariness and youthful pretensions.

Caporael paints landscapes as an ominous, mysterious force that seems on the brink of death. Trees are leafless, mountains nude and spiky, skies swirl with threatening clouds, water is an endless abyss that turns nasty green or yellow on its troubled surface. Against these theatrical, spookily lit backdrops, she sets human forms (either fully modeled or stick figures composed of red numerals), a barking dog, an empty picture frame and geometric configurations. Her sources are such artists as Edvard Munch, Elihu Vedder, Caspar David Friedrich and contemporary conceptualists.

In “The Operation,” a heroic, nude man rears back in a clearing while red numerals spin around his head and a wide-eyed face peeks out of a woodpile. The central figure seems to be on stage at a point of cosmic decision, but his situation remains ambiguous. “Apostasy” features stumbling stick figures in the foreground of a watery landscape that tunnels back into a sunset, seen through a skeletal building. Another work, “You Lied to Me,” places a nude man swimming (or drowning?) in a lake bordered by cypresses while the number 12 floats, clock-like, in the sky above him.

These strange overlays of figures and objects are conceptual puzzles that ooze with intimations of despair and longing while remaining intentionally obscure. Their meanings can be debated, as they are in Tom Heller’s catalogue essay, but they are firmly equivocal. Nothing wrong with that in principle; mystery in art works better than literal explanation. The problem here is that Caporael’s juxtapositions seem so willful and so consciously dedicated to infusing the passionately romantic with a respectable dose of the rational. Instead of presenting conflict as a profound theme, the artworks themselves seem fatally conflicted.

This turmoil probably comes from an honest desire to inject the tradition of landscape with modern anxiety and to re-examine it within an original conceptual framework. Caporael has given herself a difficult assignment; given time to grow, she may be able to solve it.