Beatrice Caracciolo

Caracciolo is an Italian artist based in Paris. She creates works in two and three dimensions, but she is best known for large-scale drawings mounted on canvas. Using a variety of types of line as well as erasure and collage, she creates abstract or nearly abstract works that have deep connections to the history of art. Among the artists Caracciolo has often returned to is the Venetian painter and draftsman Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804). This work relates to a drawing in the Morgan's collection, Pulchinelli with an Elephant (IV, 151b), one of over a hundred drawings Tiepolo made on the subject of the life of Pulchinello. Caracciolo reduces the multi-figure scene to the semblance of a single figure with an elephant. Whereas the elephant brings a sense of stasis and solidity to Tiepolo's teeming scene--which is drawn in his characteristically lively style--Caracciolo deconstructs the animal through a palimpsest of line and erasure, rendering it fluid and nearly weightless.