Caio Fonseca: Education of an Artist
 Stefano Baroni
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(8/20/2008) Going into the family business requires a healthy dose of self-esteem, discipline, and skill — not to mention affection for one’s forebears. The trick is to carry on the tradition while carving out a niche of one’s own. This is especially true in the creative arts, where the balancing act between honoring the past and moving toward the future can get tricky. Caio Fonseca, a well-regarded abstract painter, has somehow managed to walk this tightrope.
Perhaps he can thank a good gene or two. His childhood was spent on West 11th Street in Manhattan and in East Hampton, watching his painter mother, Elizabeth, and sculptor father, Gonzalo, work every day. As a boy Caio knew he wanted to do the same thing. “I’ve just found my old journals,” Mr. Fonseca said in an interview in the East Village loft where he lives and works much of the year. “They are so full of the intensity that I felt to paint. It was almost a compulsion, and I wanted to follow that thread wherever it would lead.”
Mr. Fonseca’s first paid commission, at age 14, came from Rudy DeSanti, the proprietor of the old Dreesen’s Excelsior Market on Newtown Lane, who hired him to paint a sign advertising Dreesen’s doughnuts. These days, the artist’s work is part of many permanent collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
Now, Mr. Fonseca — a handsome, dark-haired man who, at 49, cuts a Byronic figure — is returning to Newtown Lane with an exhibit of new drawings and paintings at the Drawing Room gallery, directly across the street from Dreesen’s (now L.F. boutique and Scoop du Jour).
In 1978 Mr. Fonseca left Brown University after his freshman year to join his older brother, Bruno, in Barcelona, where they studied with Augusto Torres, the son of Gonzalo Fonseca’s teacher and one of the pre-eminent painters in their native Uruguay. At the time, Mr. Torres was in his 60s and had retired from teaching . . . until the Fonseca boys arrived. In a monograph of Bruno Fonseca’s work Caio Fonseca said they realized that in many ways they were given the privilege of his tutelage for reasons not that different from those of legacy students at Ivy League institutions.
“He taught us only because we were Gonzalo Fonseca’s sons,” the younger Mr. Fonseca writes in the book. “It was invigorating to him. He wanted to teach us figurative painting. We were lucky to have grown up to have a certain reverence for certain ideals. He was a direct link to the past for us. He knew Picasso and Mondrian. He had inherited all the stories of his own father. Bruno and I felt like the heirs to several generations of tradition, both genetically, through our own father, and in terms of training.”
“I painted in a room alone. I was reclusive, and it was very intense. For me the idea of what a painter was was very different than getting out of art school and finding abstraction in the form of the figure. Each week we would travel to our teacher’s studio and then return to learn from Augusto’s criticism, by painting still lifes, self portraits, and models.”
As Mr. Fonseca’s studies progressed, the lessons became intuitive, and his work began to originate from an internal dialogue rather than the individual subject. “Augusto used to say,” Mr. Fonseca recalled in his brother’s monograph, “that when you are not working a lot, you think you need a great subject, but when you are working a lot, any subject will do.”
After 14 years of study in Barcelona, Uruguay, Paris, and Italy, Mr. Fonseca had his first solo gallery show in the United States, at the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York in 1993. He made an instant splash and, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought one of his paintings, found himself an established artist. “Since then my career has been steadily ascendant,” he said, demonstrating a modest gradient with paint-splattered hands.
“We worked so hard,” he said, of the years of study he and his brother put into their work. “I’m like a hermit now. I can be with people, but I’m an all-or-nothing person. I prefer to have chunks of time that are fairly ascetic, and then deal with the social shenanigans.”
Both making art and socializing have always been part of the Fonseca legacy. The family is large and has been creative for generations. Mr. Fonseca’s father, Gonzalo, who died in 1997, was the son of a renowned Uruguayan engineer and novelist.
Mr. Fonseca and his siblings are all articulate and outgoing. Spending summers on the sprawling, old-fashioned family compound in East Hampton, they became known for possessing a kind of charmed, bohemian-patrician aura. Mr. Fonseca’s younger sister, Isabel, is the author of the wonderful non-fiction book “Bury Me Standing,” about Roma culture in Eastern Europe, and of the recently published novel “Attachment.” His older sister, Quina, a former costume designer, is the proprietor of the Quina Fonseca collection, a well-curated collection of clothes, artwork, and furniture from South America on Route 114. In 1994, Bruno, a gifted artist on the way to a career of his own, died of complications from AIDS.
According to Mr. Fonseca this will be the first summer he has spent in East Hampton since he bought a marble workshop in Pietrasanta, Italy, in 1985, and where he lives from May through early autumn. “Every year I go to Italy to check in with my ideals — those of the 19-year-old Caio,” he said.
“I bought the workshop for $50,000,” he continued. “It belonged to two old ladies and they had dithered around with the idea of living there for years, but it had been shut down for years. It was filled with marble sinks, and carved floors. I like a certain amount of constancy: There the days are very long, the sun comes up early. I practice piano, go to the market and buy vegetables, exercise, and then try to be in the studio by noon. I paint until dark, wash up, have dinner, and sleep.”
During the rest of the year, Mr. Fonseca lives and works in New York City in a loft that has been featured in The New York Times as an example of bohemian élan. A private elevator opens onto a hallway lined with his paintings. Mr. Fonseca’s work, in fact, broods over the entire loft. “One of my favorite comments,” Mr. Fonseca said, “was from the FedEx man. He said, ‘Hey, you collect all the same guy.’ ”
 “Pietrasanta C07.21,” 2007, mixed media on canvas, 52 inches by 72 inches
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The living room is dominated by a concert grand piano, on which Mr. Fonseca practices pieces from the classical repertory obsessively. For him, music and painting are of a piece. “My work is so nonliterary,” he said. “When people look at one of my paintings and ask me what I see, I ask them what they see. I hope that in painting terms they are able to enjoy them without a wall of text. If I play Bach, people say, ‘How beautiful.’ They never say, ‘What’s it about?’ I’m trying to express that in my paintings.”
“Pietrasanta C07.21,” at the Drawing Room gallery, is a large mixed-media painting on canvas which, for one viewer, conjures up the old rhyme whispered in every bride’s ear:
Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a silver sixpence in her shoe
In it, the artist combined vaguely transparent marine-blue boomerangs that seem bound for a midair capriccio, but turn inward instead. The shapes are so simple that it is difficult to avoid trying to define them: Are they inspired by photos of the polar collar on Venus? Will they reconcile like horseshoe magnets? Or simply shiver endlessly in a sea of borrowed nostalgia (grand piano cases done up in French nautical stripes, vintage postage stamps from the Cote d’Azur, the decorative graphics of sailing insignia)?
Like a snatch of melody, the painting momentarily offers a flight of imagination that stills chatter and fluttering thoughts.
Mr. Fonseca says his narrative-defying style partly stems from a natural gift for languages. In addition to English, he speaks French, Italian, and Spanish, but says that to him these are just sounds like any other. “Bread is a word,” he said cryptically, by way of explanation. “It’s just a sound.” (Although he makes an exception for the language one’s mother spoke. That language, he said, is much more primal, and emotionally charged.)
Five years ago, Mr. Fonseca’s hard work allowed him to construct a studio on the family compound on Route 114 in East Hampton. In the 1950s Jacob Kaplan, Mrs. Fonseca’s father, had purchased 165 acres between the turnpike and Long Lane from Judge Samuel Seabury, for $21,000, after a fire destroyed the Kaplans’ house on Tides Turn Lane, off Lily Pond Lane. The main house on the former Seabury property, and four acres of land, were donated in 1999 to the Nature Conservancy by the Kaplan Trust and now serve as its Long Island headquarters.
“It’s spartan,” Mr. Fonseca said of his studio. “But I enjoy empty space as a possession. When I was 14, I got every type of watch, stopwatch, and camera — it was almost insane — and since then I haven’t liked stuff. I wait for things to come to me.”
Mr. Fonseca’s presence on the East End this summer is thanks to the marriage of a friend’s daughter, whose nuptials will take place at his studio. “I knew I’d be out here,” he said. “I thought I’d like to have a show, and see some of my old friends — so I called the Drawing Room gallery. I asked if they might be interested in showing my work, and we hit it off. I’m looking forward to it, seeing my mother, my sisters, Quina and Isabel, my cousins, my nephews and nieces. Then I plan to work there through October for a show opening at Ben Brown in London in January.”
He spends time on the East End during the off-season, and he avoids weekends whenever possible. “I’m able to work for long uninterrupted periods of time. And sometimes, after spending my childhood summers in East Hampton, I get momentary Proustian memory sensations.”