Hidden Flag Collage

ERIC CAPEL (b. Toronto Canada December 14, 1948). I categorize my work as Social Abstraction: abstract art with social or political influences immersed in the paint. I’m working on a collection of acrylic, collage, and graphite paintings on birchwood panels with the occasional diptych or work on paper, whose laborious surfaces are ghost images of emotional and political terrain. Each work begins with lengths of twine stretched across the canvas at one-inch intervals, creating a linear grid. This grid is the foundation on top of which is built of images, graphic patterns, words, and phrases. The layers of which, are selectively hidden or left exposed. What remains is a pictorial record, a fossil, of their evolution. What I have so laboriously constructed, I attack, tearing away the layers with power sanders, knives, and spray bottles. Revealing a strata of colors and embedded images, raw and exposed. The surface bears visual allusions to the works of abstract expressionism and street art, recontextualizing the polished traditions of high art with a grittier urban flair that is explosively contemporary. All reference to the twine guides, all that remains, are the horizontal scars of their absence. “Hidden Depths” is a personal exploration of my hidden potential after fifty years in another creative field. Eric, calls home Montreal, where he has his studio “Atelier lyfe on mars”.