11/12/2025
CLOSING SOON
Wainer Vaccari
Capricci
at until December 19, 2025
arrow or spear aimed at the sky
low on a ceiling from whose center
everything begins once again
Unlike a tamed Ophelia, the woman in Vaccari’s Untitled (1990) stands defiantly in water; and unlike Narcissus, her gaze is fixed not upon herself but upon a frame: a threshold into which a genderless figure crawls. In Capriccio 73 (1996) a man kneels over to kiss a person, both on the verge of metamorphosis. Without precedent or antecedent, Wainer Vaccari arrests moments in media res. The figures melt into each other and themselves, resisting observation, while revealing a turbulence of interpretations. Though, at times, Vaccari’s Capricci recall ancient literature, Honoré Daumier’s exhausted figures, De Chirico’s barren piazzas – their figures occupy a no-man’s-land, unmoored from chronology, and untethered from place.
Vaccari, a self-proclaimed lover of the symbolist Arnold Böcklin, shares his ability to humanize ancient mythology. The humanity he affords them deflates their heroism and drama into mundane scenes, bringing the nymphs, fauns, gods, and heroes out from myth to hide “behind the corners of houses in our cities”. Thus, spawning uncanny figures, at once recognizable yet unplaceable.
Text excerpt by .borges.campos
Installation view: Joanna Wilk
