Spell of the Sensuous

YJ Contemporary Fine Art Gallery • East Greenwich, RI • yjcontemporary.com • July 25–September 4, 2019

Spell of the Sensuous takes its title from David Abram’s ecological philosophy text, and could not be more apt as the title for this joint exhibition by photographers Joyce Tenneson and John Paul Caponigro. The large-format aluminum printed photographs are enchanting—the dye sublimation process lends the prints a stunning luminescence.

Tenneson’s spirited portraits and Caponigro’s vibrant wastelands complement each other visually and thematically, perhaps a reflection of their over 30-year friendship. This is their first collaboration, though, and features approximately 33 parallel works on the theme of the sensual. While the spirals of Caponigro’s Alignment V and Tenneson’s Nautilus vary in scope and scale, both images engage Abram’s project of collapsing the false divide between human and nature. These photographs work together to reveal the personality of the natural world and the ineffably natural in the human.

Joyce Tenneson, Dasha With Doves, 2002, photograph, dye sublimated on aluminum, 43 ½ x 38″. Courtesy of YJ Contemporary Fine Art.

Tenneson’s photographs have tended towards portraiture, capturing the energy of New York, but since moving to Maine she has refocused her eye on the landscape. Her latest photographs are monumental yet imagine their subjects as deeply personal, as with the statuesque tree posing against a backdrop of golden fog in Apple Tree (2016), which echoes the ethereal quality of the woman pictured in Dasha with Doves (2002). Tenneson reminiscences on the joy of hunting for beauty at the flower market for her floral images. She poses her subjects against black velvet, “like a jeweler would,” to capture their luscious idiosyncrasies. The individuality of her subjects suffuses all her photographs, regardless of their particular form: human, flora, fauna or mineral.

Caponigro’s landscapes similarly shine with a sense of presence even in, or perhaps because of, their apparent inaccessibility. The windswept deserts and glaciers offer images that are somehow both seemingly timeless and ephemeral, given the shifting conditions of the atmosphere. Rather than “personifying” nature, as Tenneson’s works seem to, Caponigro’s vast spaces invite questions about our relationship to these sublime, seemingly inhospitable sites. Spell of the Sensuous offers scenes of the natural world of which we are inextricably a part, diffusing our perceived separation by embedding us in the sensory.