Wadsworth Matrix 198 — Adams and Ollman

Mariel Capanna:
MATRIX 198
The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

March 5—July 26, 2026

On large linen-covered panels sized to the dimensions of the MATRIX Gallery entrance, Capanna created a series of paintings that takes The Wadsworth’s American art collection as its point of departure. Capanna selected a handful of artworks she felt a strong personal response to, including Bob Thompson’s Garden of Music (1963), Florine Stettheimer’s Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum (1924), and John Trumbull’s The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775 (1834), and used each as the basis for a new painting. Beyond the evident desire to respond to the museum context and to create denser works for the more compact and enclosed gallery setting, Capanna notes that the American Semiquincentennial in 2026 also informed her decision to focus on American art and, in her own peculiar way, situate herself within the tradition.

Borrowing the palette from each of her collection sources, Capanna then watched films that related (in her subjective view) to the paintings in subject matter or time period. For Stettheimer, she selected romps like Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Singin’ in the Rain, while for Thompson she chose jazz documentaries like Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Jazz on a Summer Day. Painting while the films played, Capanna climbed up and down her studio ladder and filled the large canvases with energetic, cacophonous tangles of colorful marks and gestures that evoke the experience of getting lost in a crowd or swept up in a tornado. While the finished paintings retain a memory of the reference works, Capanna has used her parameters to create paintings that feel new and strange yet somehow familiar. Titles like Flowers, Ladders, Fires, Flags (2025) direct our attention even further away from the reference paintings, inviting us to search for images that may or may not appear.

The gallery entrance is surrounded by a set of custom fresco panels that hug the doorway, literally framing visitors’ entry to the exhibition and their view back out towards the museum from within. This fresco contains a sinopia, the preparatory drawing developed on the penultimate layer of plaster (arriccio) using a reddish-brown earth pigment. The sinopia is always hidden in a finished fresco, but here, it becomes the visible surface, suggesting the still-flexible, not-fully-committed draft of a fresco not yet made.

—Jared Quinton, Emily Hall Tremaine Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art