Focus: Under the Caribbean Sea with Tony Capellán

Tony Capellán was born in Tamboríl, in the Dominican Republic. Trained as both a painter and a printmaker, Capellán began working in the 1990s in a mixed format, incorporating found objects that he transforms with other materials such as paint and barbed wire.

Mar Caribe is an installation whose dimensions vary depending on how the objects are arranged. This constant change in the presentation of the work arguably reflects both the physical changes of the Caribbean Sea and the social displacement of the marginalized people who cross it. The work consists of some 500 green and blue rubber flip-flops that the artist found on the banks of the Ozama River in the Dominican Republic. These sandals are the “remains” of the poor who have passed through this geographic area. They can be arranged either in a rectangle or in a circle, projecting a panoramic vision of the sea. Capellán modifies the flip-flops by replacing the rubber pieces that hold the toes with barbed wire. In doing so, he places his work within the Duchampian “ready-made” tradition, while subverting it through a post-colonial perspective. Barbed wire is used to keep people from entering or leaving; it tears flesh and makes it bleed – a brutal reminder that beyond the beautiful blue-green colors of the Caribbean, this sea and this region remain places of exploitation and suffering.

He studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, where his thinking was influenced by one of his professors, the poet Pedro Mir, whose aesthetic merged a post-colonial perspective with a syncretic spirituality. Capellán went on to study in New York, at the Art Students League of New York. In 1980, shortly after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Capellán volunteered to take part in its literacy campaign, forming friendships and collaborating with Comandante Tomás Borge and the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal. In the early 1980s, the artist turned to sculptural installation using found and transformed objects.

A maritime rope from a stranded boat, the remains of children’s toys that have seen their childhood and innocence depart, legs and arms joined together in a spiral, like handholds in the whirlwind and the wind, like the rubber sandals that remain as mute witnesses of a farewell forever, of the cavalry of drowned immigrants, just like the round house and the details of a small tree of plastic colors, which seem to spring up like ivy from an unpolluted white mural and seem to scatter like the cry of a baby without dreams. Everything reminds us how fleeting and fragile life is, like curls of smoke that rise and drift through the air. Meanwhile, the waves keep coming and going, just like thoughts…

His shift to installation reflects his desire to work in a flexible, adaptable idiom that reflects the complex and controversial issues – post-colonialism, poverty, racism, environmental destruction – that affect the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and Latin America. Capellán began taking part in group exhibitions at the national, regional and international levels in 1979. In 1992, the artist took part in La Bienal Marginal, an alternative exhibition that protested the festive nature of the quincentenary, organized by the artist and activist Silvano Lora and presented in the homes and streets of the Santa Bárbara shantytown in Santo Domingo. 1995 was a critical year, with the solo exhibitions Marcha forzada at the Casa de Bastidas in Santo Domingo; Preguntas sin respuestas at the Central European Center for Ceramics in Amsterdam, Holland; and Exportadores de almas at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo. Capellán represented the Dominican Republic at the São Paulo Biennial in 1994 and at the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995. He was living and working in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, at the time of his death.