Derivatives from a body of work he has created for a private presentation to Home Malaparte on the island of Capri, Italy, in 2016, these paintings mark a completely new direction in the practice of Grotjahn, while moving away from face paintings in favor of a more experimental, spontaneous work process.
In his paintings, drawings and sculptures, Grotjahn weaves and revitalizes various historical modes of abstraction, probing the limits between gesture and geometry, impulse and exactitude. His works develop according to precise but mutating rubrics, giving life to a large vocabulary of visual motifs that migrate from one series to another in compulsive and self-referential permutations. Like sedimentary cross sections or horizonless landscapes, the Capri series contrasts total quality of Expressionism Abstract with moments of controlled, almost minimalistic logic.
Grotjahn started New Capri in 2016, inspired by writer Curzio Malaparte's legendary home perched on a cliff in Capri. Painted on cardboard and framed behind glass, the New Capri works appear as small jewellike objects, echoing the geological and botanical patterns of the Mediterranean environment (itself framed by the house's windows).
Trying to abandon the representative qualities of his own Face paintings (2003) – in which slanted eyes form focal points within kaleidoscopic abstractions – Grotjahn enlarges their multicolored arcs, then explores the variations of certain sections on a larger, more enveloping scale. Thus, in the works of Capri (2016), painted on canvas, he alternates between vertical and horizontal structures, confusing every residue of the paintings of the Face by exploiting the infinite mutability of the painting itself: spreading it; create rolls, balls and splashes; writing his name and various dates. The Capri paintings challenge the viewer to determine the chronology of Grotjahn's marks and strokes, which are lifted from the picture plane like an impenetrable and thorny brush, trapping the eye in their puzzling matrices. In the paintings of Star Capri in red, black and white, the tips of the almond shapes of the faces form rhythmic geometries, like stars or graphic flowers.
In Free Capri (2018), the last of the three series, Grotjahn seems to have completely abandoned faces. Many of the canvases feature parallel rows of "snails," grids of check marks that accumulate on Grotjahn's palette knife as he slobbers into the thick impasto while he's still wet. Literally pulling the background into the foreground, Grotjahn attaches snails to the surface of the painting by drawing a thin line through them, bringing together the painted surface with his own waste products. Tapered at both ends, the bullets appear alive, creeping into compositions and picking streaks of color along the way.
