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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The way American painter Caio Fonseca speaks is important. His voice is earnest and syncopated. He pronounces his T's clearly and crisply, even at the ends of words. Though he is American, his intonation is vaguely European. And for good reason\u2014after dropping out of Brown, he studied painting in Spain, Italy, France, and elsewhere for 15 years before returning to New York in 1993 and selling paintings to the Metropolitan Museum at his very first show that same year.\n\n Following Fonseca's exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery in New York, GQ Deputy Editor and fellow painter Michael Hainey sat down with Fonseca to discuss the new direction of his work, as well as the influence of music on his art, his relationship with his sculptor father, and the importance of loneliness.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: This obviously is a leap here. How did that happen?\n\n Caio Fonseca: I'm still trying to understand how. I actually got out of bed at four in the morning one night and painted the first one. I think that I had explored every possible corner of the tonal world of painting\u2014it's almost like the history of music, where every aspect of tonality had been explored. There's a famous quote ascribed to Arnold Schoenberg. Some student of his said, \"Are you Arnold Schoenberg?\" and he said, \"Somebody had to be!\" Meaning that he was a great tonal composer, but he realized the implication after Mahler and Bruckner\u2014he himself composed in the older styles, but it had to come almost resentfully. He had to change.\n\n I don't feel any resentment, but I do look at the work and not immediately recognize them as me me. It had the feeling of both trying to learn a new language and speak it at the same time. The strange thing is that I did five or six of these paintings last spring, and I had excellent beginner's luck. I went to Italy, where I normally get such great results, and I made every necessary mistake, in a way. Technically these paintings were very different. In the past I needed the paint to stay wet for 10 hours, which is a lot to ask of New York\u2014un-interruption for 10 hours\u2014whereas the place I have in Italy, the phone doesn't ring. Every year for 25 years I've had about five months of pure studio time in Italy. I realized that I was actually quite dependent on that double life, of separating my New York life from my pure studio time. There's something about having month after month after month without interruption that allows you to exceed what you're capable of in a place like New York. I think these paintings take so long because every little detail affects the whole. It's constantly adding and subtracting, adding and subtracting. I don't think you decide a painting is done; I think you discover it's done when you can no longer add or subtract. You have to have ruined a number of paintings to know that that's a good time to stop.\n\n It's funny, when I play a piece by Bach for someone, no one ever said, \"Oh, that's beautiful, but what does it mean?\" It's strange, because they should be saying that. What does it mean? It's completely abstract. But culturally, or as humans, we accept that kind of music for what it is, though there could be nothing more abstract. So I live and breathe that kind of abstraction, where the meaning is one that is revealed in the language of paint, not in the text on the wall, per se. But I might be getting too specific. That was one answer to one question.\n\nGQ: [Laughs] No, not at all. You do use a little bit of the language of music when you talk about the new series of paintings and how it's much more structure and scale versus tone.\n\n Caio Fonseca: It's difficult to describe, but I have had recourse to certain musical terms for these paintings. I know how to paint them now and it took a long time to get this sort of grammar down. I've been playing piano my whole life, but I've only been studying composition for about three years. And it's the damndest hobby to have\u2014it's like launching a canoe into the Pacific, it's such a big undertaking. But it's been so exciting. It's as if you've loved looking at paintings your whole life but never painted one. You don't automatically understand what they're made out of. You think that Beethoven descended from the gods, but it's a learnable thing. That doesn't mean you're going to be Beethoven, but it's not just genius. I can now produce mediocre classical music, which is amazing. It's like someone who was afraid of water can now surf, really badly. It's an amazing transformation. I'm not trying to be a professional, but I'm pretty serious about it. I want to keep understanding more and more.\n\nGQ: Why the flecks of red?\n\n Caio Fonseca: These paintings are probably as minimal and as clean as I've ever painted, but I still very much value that they're painted by my hand and they're not trying to imitate a kind of machine precision. The red speckles, as the ridges, wax, and glazes that are on there\u2014I think I want every inch of the surface to be alive when you look up close. I don't want it just to be a graphic statement\u2014it has to have a physical life to it, as well as a kind of intangible spirit or poetic rhythm.\n\nGQ: Did this work demand the show, or did you commit to the show and then the work appeared?\n\n Caio Fonseca: Good question. I started making the shift last year, and when my dealer saw them, he was really into them. Which means, like, were you not that into what I was doing before? [laughs] It's like when people say, \"You look great!' 'Oh, so before?\" I mean, for a painter, to make a step forward in your work is a huge deal. It's not like Madonna, every year a different personality. The work itself changes. If an uninitiated person looked at the work of Mozart from different times in his career they would say, \"Well that's still Mozart\u2026' But to know the difference and the huge achievements involved in that process! A painter is interested in what might seem more incremental steps. If you come every day or every month to my studio you won't see that much change, but if you come once a year, you'll see big new categories opened up.\n\n I guess this is part of being a certain kind of painter, but I spend a lot of time alone in my life. My whole 20s I was in a room learning painting. For me it was like an Everest to scale. My father was a great artist, so I think for me it wasn't just going to art school and becoming an artist. I didn't have my first show until I'd been painting for 14 years. My very first show, the Metropolitan Museum bought two paintings, so it was like overnight success that had been coming for 15 years. It was heady, to say the least. Painting is something that requires a lot of time\u2014it's not just one good idea out of art school. Some people use canvas as a place to put a billboard up. It's not necessarily painting, but it's, \"I'm using this.\" None of it's illegal, but if you're going to be a pianist, you should know how to play piano. Very few pianists can pretend they know how to play, whereas artists today, there are no rules.\n\nGQ: How would you describe your relationship with your father?\n\n Caio Fonseca: Great.\n\nGQ: Competitive?\n\n Caio Fonseca: No, not competitive. He was wise enough not to mix the father-son relationship with the master-pupil one. My brother and I didn't study with him proper; we studied with an older colleague of his who was indeed the son of the man he studied with, Torres Garcia, a great master. I would say the relationship, at least the mental one, was that he was just such an original human being of tremendous integrity. That for us, being an artist wasn't just putting together a show. I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure. All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer. Had we had one dentist, it would have been a nice thing, my mother kept saying. 'What, we couldn't have one lawyer?'\n\nGQ: What do you think your father taught you about life?\n\n Caio Fonseca: He taught me a lot of things. I would say the commitment to integrity and also the joy and difficulty of painting\u2014you go to your studio and you don't know what you're going to produce, but then you come back with something. He inculcated the commitment to the studio practice without saying it. You cannot sleep at night if you don't believe in your work. And in order to believe in your work consistently for decades and decades, you have to keep investing in it. You have to bring all your wits to it. It's a very high craft to have something so complex and have it be so simple. A successful painting is seemingly simple and announces itself with freshness and lightness, not 'Do you realize how hard it was to get here?'\n\nGQ: Sure, people always say 'Oh, I could have done that,' but actually, you don't realize that we'll take you into the studio and you'll see 10,000 sketches that get you to this one canvas.\n\n Caio Fonseca: It really is true. I've had one or two people try to copy my work, which I don't mind, but one guy did an actual copy of an actual painting\u2014that's not right. This guy once came and he wanted to buy a painting, and he ended up not buying a painting. And then he wanted to borrow one for the opening of something, and then he ended up not doing that. Fine. He left. Three months later, an art critic who knows my work very well said, \"Oh, Caio, I just had dinner at so-and-so's new restaurant, and I was sitting right under your painting.\" I said, \"No, no, no, he came, but he didn't get anything.\" He said, \"Caio, I was sitting right under the painting.\" I said, \"Really? That's strange.\" So finally, months later, I went up there, and sure enough he had commissioned some young painter to do a kind of knock off. What was interesting was that it was a hodgepodge\u2014it had none of the way I put together my form, but it was all my little tools and little forms, just jumbled in someone else's brain and canvas. So good for the young painter that got a job; I was not upset. But another friend of mine has had people do things that are way too similar.\n\nGQ: Do you have an assistant or do you do everything yourself?\n\n Caio Fonseca: There's nothing for an assistant to do. I would love to give an assistant some work here and help me with the paintings, but there's not a single thing for them to do. I think it's wrong. If you're really old and can't do something difficult, that's fine, maybe. But just to have people do your work for you? I mean, Damien Hirst is almost trying to offset the disgust at that by just being so upfront about it, but it's just like...\n\nGQ: No, you're right. I remember seeing this documentary of Motherwell and it was late in his life, and he had an assistant to help him move the canvases around. He would say, \"Put the brush up there so I can see how high it goes.\" That makes total sense, but that's assisting rather than creating.\n\n Caio Fonseca: Yeah, there are lots of assistants who do all kinds of things like mixing colors. The only thing I format is the stretching of the canvas. Even the preparing of the ridges, someone else could do that but it wouldn't be the same. My father carved all of his stones by hand himself. It's the result, in the end, that matters. It's not about who did more. But I just don't have assistants, because it's not about just ecuting an idea, it's actually making the idea, incarnating the idea.\n\nGQ: Are you a loner?\n\n Caio Fonseca: I do have a tremendous capacity to be alone. I'm able to be alone productively and well. Other times I overdo it a bit. I'm also strange\u2014I am a hermit that can work a crowd. I can public speak\u2014I'm not an award person.\n\nGQ: You're secure in your aloneness.\n\n Caio Fonseca: Yeah. Unless it's heartache or something, then it's heavy, but otherwise...\n\nGQ: Has it always been that way? Back to when you were a kid?\n\n Caio Fonseca: I don't know about kid, but since I was about 18, I think. I was pretty much on my own at Brown and then I went to Europe.\n\nGQ: Do you have close friends?\n\n Caio Fonseca: Oh, yeah. I've had long relationships. Seven years, four years. But my work is a solitary craft.\n\nGQ: But that's also old school, don't you think?\n\n Caio Fonseca: Maybe it is.\n\nGQ: In a world where artists are supposed to be big public personas, generating that image takes a lot of time and effort. That's why you have to have people working for you.\n\n Caio Fonseca: Exactly. But I think you should have people do all the talking for you and you should do the work. Obviously before a show you've got to switch gears and do interviews and speaking, but I would rather have five months of pure time to get a real body of work together than constant stop-starting. There are so many joys and wonders in the studio, too. It's not just being alone. Painting is a dialogue\u2014you do something in error, or something good, and then you respond. It's very engrossing. But right now, I think my work took a big leap in a different direction, ahead of my own life. It's as if my work shifted before I did.\n\nGQ: Do you think the work portends something?\n\n Caio Fonseca: No, I think it is the shift. In a year or two, I'll know what part of that shift this was. But it is a new experience for me to have a sense that maybe this is just one iteration of an idea that I need to explore, and I already have ideas for sculpture, just to complicate my life [laughs]. Why can't I have a hobby like everyone else? I like to bicycle, I guess that's as close as I'll get.\n\nGQ: What I see in these paintings is a clinging together. You look at these forms and I find them very soothing because they come together. I would dare say that there's something in you that's coming together. It's soothing.\n\n Caio Fonseca: That's great to hear. I haven't had so much feedback yet, but I like how you put it\u2014the coming together. That's actually very touching to me that you would pick up on that. It's actually a little more than what I picked up.\n\nGQ: I can just sit here for a long time. They articulate that sort of serenity.\n\n Caio Fonseca: And you would think that because they're so stark and black that they'd be cold, but no. Another thing my father said is that you cannot help but express your autobiography in your work. Take these four artists: Bach and Vel\u00E1zquez over here, and Goya and Beethoven over here. If you were a biographer, who would you rather write on?\n\nGQ: Goya and Beethoven.\n\n Caio Fonseca: Of course, right? They're all equally great, but Beethoven and Goya had these huge extra-musical, extra-pictorial lives that are great for a biographer. Whereas Bach, what the hell do you write? Yes, there are some facts, and Vel\u00E1zquez did this and that, but it's all in the work. If you don't count the work, there's not that much to say. But if you do count the work\u2014my God, what a huge inner life. Why are we still listening to Bach? I can't get enough of it and I'm 300 years later. Why is it so modern in terms of its resonance with the human being? A Greek statue, an urn\u2014certain things have resonance. It's a universal thing. And since I was a very young man, my eyes were always on that, and that's what made me more of a loner. I'm not a loner by nature; I'm a very affable and social person. There's been a tension in me about that, but my need to keep my eyes on a horizon has demanded it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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