Caio Fonseca

On the mysteries of the visual world…

TEXT: AARON DALTON
PHOTO: ALAN ZINDMAN / LUCY FREMONT

When he was 19 years old, Caio Fonseca left his New York City home and moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he began five years of intensive studies with well-known Uruguayan painter Augusto Torres (1913-1992), son of the maestro Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949).

In Barcelona, Fonseca became fluent in Spanish to communicate with his teacher. Such was his dedication to art that Fonseca would begin a sunlit still life and only stop painting hours later when he realized that sundown had passed and he was working in the pitch dark.

Looking back on his first efforts in Barcelona, Fonseca says that even the paintings he remembers creating in bright sunshine came out too dark. He attributes the discrepancy to his early inability to truly see and understand light. “Until you understand light, you cannot really see,” says Fonseca. “Solving the mysteries of the visual world is a long evolution. The discovery of light goes hand in hand with the discovery of paint, and that is a thread that I have been following for 25 years.”

Son of an American mother and the late Uruguayan artist of great renown, Gonzalo Fonseca, Caio grew up in New York City. “My father was a towering example of integrity,” says Fonseca. “For better or worse, all his children became artists. We saw up close the possibilities of that life. It was not enough to go to art school and start exhibiting – I spent 14 years in little rooms in strange places painting before I thought I was ready. I had a high standard of what I thought it took to be a painter. My father set the bar high by example.”

For five months each year, Caio Fonseca paints in a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy. In this tiny medieval town, where Michelangelo chose marble for his masterpieces, Fonseca works free from interruptions, building the momentum to develop evolutionary works. “One painting leads to another, day after day,” he says. “The town is a constant, which allows for lots of discovery and change in the studio.”

His other main workshop is in Manhattan’s East Village,where Fonseca finds the rhythm and energy that imbue his paintings with what he calls a “processional quality” in which forms seem to move across the canvas. In this metropolis, Fonseca hones his considerable skill as a classical pianist and prepares for gallery exhibitions.

Not surprisingly, Fonseca’s New York paintings differ from those he composes in the Italian countryside. “The colors that surround me and the light that affects those colors inevitably ends up in my paintings,” he says. “In retrospect, the paintings I do in Italy have a more pastoral or naturalistic color. I study how nature reacts and then use that to build up my own invented world.” But Fonseca does not call the forms that inhabit his invented world “symbols” or “abstractions.” “If a Bach concerto does not have to explain its meaning, why should painting have to explain itself in anything other than its own language?”

When he was 19 years old, Caio Fonseca left his New York City home and moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he began five years of intensive studies with well-known Uruguayan painter Augusto Torres (1913-1992), son of the maestro Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949).

In Barcelona, Fonseca became fluent in Spanish to communicate with his teacher. Such was his dedication to art that Fonseca would begin a sunlit still life and only stop painting hours later when he realized that sundown had passed and he was working in the pitch dark.

Looking back on his first efforts in Barcelona, Fonseca says that even the paintings he remembers creating in bright sunshine came out too dark. He attributes the discrepancy to his early inability to truly see and understand light. “Until you understand light, you cannot really see,” says Fonseca. “Solving the mysteries of the visual world is a long evolution. The discovery of light goes hand in hand with the discovery of paint, and that is a thread that I have been following for 25 years.”

Son of an American mother and the late Uruguayan artist of great renown, Gonzalo Fonseca, Caio grew up in New York City. “My father was a towering example of integrity,” says Fonseca. “For better or worse, all his children became artists. We saw up close the possibilities of that life. It was not enough to go to art school and start exhibiting – I spent 14 years in little rooms in strange places painting before I thought I was ready. I had a high standard of what I thought it took to be a painter. My father set the bar high by example.”

For five months each year, Caio Fonseca paints in a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy. In this tiny medieval town, where Michelangelo chose marble for his masterpieces, Fonseca works free from interruptions, building the momentum to develop evolutionary works. “One painting leads to another, day after day,” he says. “The town is a constant, which allows for lots of discovery and change in the studio.”

His other main workshop is in Manhattan’s East Village,where Fonseca finds the rhythm and energy that imbue his paintings with what he calls a “processional quality” in which forms seem to move across the canvas. In this metropolis, Fonseca hones his considerable skill as a classical pianist and prepares for gallery exhibitions.

Not surprisingly, Fonseca’s New York paintings differ from those he composes in the Italian countryside. “The colors that surround me and the light that affects those colors inevitably ends up in my paintings,” he says. “In retrospect, the paintings I do in Italy have a more pastoral or naturalistic color. I study how nature reacts and then use that to build up my own invented world.” But Fonseca does not call the forms that inhabit his invented world “symbols” or “abstractions.” “If a Bach concerto does not have to explain its meaning, why should painting have to explain itself in anything other than its own language?”
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