Mariel Capanna:
Giornata
February 15, 2025—January 25, 2026
at the Clark Art Institute

The Brooklyn Rail
Mariel Capanna: Giornata
Giles Heno-Coe
June 2025

Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition. For the Clark, the Philadelphia-based artist presents two new, site-responsive oil paintings as well as a monumental fresco on a wall set into a niche in the Manton Reading Room. The fresco and the oil paintings presented in the Clark’s spaces suggest the artist’s interest in the passage, perception, and limitations of time.

The oil paintings, on view in the Clark Center’s lower level, might appear blank from a distance, but reveal a frenzy of marks up close. Capanna prepares her canvases with layers of atmospheric color then paints quickly from home videos and family slideshows without hitting pause. While her low contrast linework appears faint from the front, it is more visible from the side: Capanna mixes wax and marble dust into her oil paint so that the materials project off the surface and reflect light. Memory, the artist believes, “can always be viewed at different distances and with shifting qualities of attention.” The titles of the two works name some of the objects pictured in them: Tulip, Faucet, Candles, Cat and Goose, Fruit, Awning, Arm (both 2024).

On view in the Manton Research Center’s reading room is her fresco, created on-site at the Clark, titled Wall Painting with Child. The scene, zoomed in to the point of abstraction, unfolds across three sides of a portable fresco wall created for the installation. Capanna practices buon fresco, or “true fresco,” a traditional technique in which pigments are applied to and fuse with the wet plaster of a wall (the word fresco means “fresh”). The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: since the Italian Renaissance, the term giornata has referred to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day.

Contrasting the works on view at the Clark, Capanna explains: “While the oil paintings are color fields from a distance whose scattered parts become legible up close, the fresco is a cropped but legible scene from a distance that becomes a series of color fields up close.”

This year-long installation, free and open to the public, is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.

Generous support for Mariel Capanna: Giornata is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg.

Installation views: Mariel Capanna: Giornata, the Clark Art Institute, 2025–26, Williamstown, MAssachusetts. Courtesy Clark Art Institute. Photo: Thomas Clark.