shashasha

In her series “Naïvy” (a play on “Navy” and “naivety”), Spanish artist Coco Capitán creates a fictional maritime world in pictures and handwritten notes. Her images reference the sea either directly or subtly, for example by the inclusion of sailor uniforms, and weave an ambience of youthful adventure, freedom, sexuality, loss of innocence and belonging. The atmosphere verging between the enigmatic and the concrete, Capitán seems to have lured her subjects out of a mythical world of brave forlornness into the intricate compositions of her photographs.

“‘Has your life the dimensions of a pool,’ Capitán asks herself and her readers, ‘or the ocean?’ Not only is this question representative of her literary sensibility full of emotions and wittiness, but it also emphasizes how important and symbolic the timeless motif of the ocean has been to her wide-ranging artistic practice. Naïvy offers multiple interpretation and has wide ‘dimensions’ that go beyond those of a ‘pool’: its lyrical quality evokes the feeling of looking at the ocean with melancholy for all that has been lost in our lives and yet anticipation towards the unknown future.”
― from curator Lena Fritzsch’s afterword (included in Japanese & English)