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拍品专文
An immersive, celestial vision spanning more than two metres in width, Capriccio is a sumptuous work from Flora Yukhnovich’s series of Venice Paintings. Painted in 2019, during a two-month residency in the city, it demonstrates her embrace of new Italian influences: from the language of the Venetian Rococo, encapsulated in Tiepolo’s ceiling frescoes, to the music of Vivaldi. Included in the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen between 2024 and 2025, the work is based on Francesco Zuccarelli’s The Rape of Europa (1740-1750, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice). Yukhnovich transforms her source into a seductive, near-abstract effusion of textures and forms, with hints of flesh, flora and fauna rippling across the surface. Bathed in golden light, the painting captures the distinctive new pink-tinged palette that came to dominate the Venice Paintings, as well as the artist’s shift towards looser, improvisatory brushwork. This freedom is reflected in the work’s title, Capriccio: a musical term used to denote a lively, spontaneous and virtuosic playing style.
Yukhnovich’s early practice drew heavily upon French Rococo painting and the fête galante genre, embodied by artists such as Fragonard and Watteau. She was fascinated by the parallels she observed between Rococo vernaculars of excess, frivolity and ornamentation and certain aspects of modern-day consumer culture: particularly in products and campaigns targeted at women. The Venice Paintings, however, marked a subtle shift away from this focus. ‘Typically, I’m looking for a commonality between the Rococo style and something I’ve seen in an advert, on TV or in a shop,’ she explains. ‘… In Venice, however, it was a little different because unlike London there isn’t much contemporary imagery around. It’s really like a time capsule. So the work I made there is less about the influence of the Rococo on contemporary aesthetics and more to do with researching the Rococo and its 18th-century context, as it existed in Venice … I was then using my paintings as a way to unpick them—to understand their colours, and construction’ (in conversation with N. Gonzalez Martin, Floorr Magazine, Issue 24, online).
Capriccio marked something of a bridge between these two bodies of work. ‘I kept thinking about the difference between Venetian and French Rococo,’ explains Yukhnovich. ‘Venetian Rococo has a distinctive treatment of space which is logical, organised in planes like a theatre set.’ The artist had long admired the work of Tiepolo, but had struggled to reconcile it with her interests in French art. In Venice, however, she had the opportunity to observe his ceiling frescoes in the Ca’ Rezzonico museum and the Chiesa Santa Maria della Visitazione first-hand. ‘I wondered if I could knit the layers together using Tiepolo’s diagonal movements to collapse the space at points in the composition, bringing paint to the fore,’ she recalls. ‘I wanted it to feel as if it were undoing and reforming itself across the whole picture plain as well as in the figuration. This painting … combined with some of the French figures and fleshy forms I had looked at before, feels like a synthesis of what I learned in Venice and ideas I had been working on back home’ (artist statement, May 2020, Victoria Miro, online).
The present work is one of a number from the series titled after Italian musical terms. Yukhnovich realised that what ultimately linked the French and Italian Rococo styles was a sense of theatricality, manifested specifically in the latter through a ‘dance-like movement in the composition and the play of light.’ Tiepolo’s fresco in the Chiesa Santa Maria della Visitazione, she explains, was linked to the music school where Vivaldi worked. It was ‘made in response to that and is partly a celebration of music. When I saw it for the first time on my residency there, Tiepolo’s paintings and their relationship to the Rococo suddenly made sense to me. My eye seemed to ping around the painting as I moved underneath it, and with the help of the music, I began to understand it as choreography as much as composition. It made me think more about the role of the viewer and the way the eye travels around a painting’ (in conversation with N. Gonzalez Martin, op. cit.). These revelations simmer in the depths of the present work, its forms dancing across the surface like intricate lines of polyphony.
Yukhnovich’s early practice drew heavily upon French Rococo painting and the fête galante genre, embodied by artists such as Fragonard and Watteau. She was fascinated by the parallels she observed between Rococo vernaculars of excess, frivolity and ornamentation and certain aspects of modern-day consumer culture: particularly in products and campaigns targeted at women. The Venice Paintings, however, marked a subtle shift away from this focus. ‘Typically, I’m looking for a commonality between the Rococo style and something I’ve seen in an advert, on TV or in a shop,’ she explains. ‘… In Venice, however, it was a little different because unlike London there isn’t much contemporary imagery around. It’s really like a time capsule. So the work I made there is less about the influence of the Rococo on contemporary aesthetics and more to do with researching the Rococo and its 18th-century context, as it existed in Venice … I was then using my paintings as a way to unpick them—to understand their colours, and construction’ (in conversation with N. Gonzalez Martin, Floorr Magazine, Issue 24, online).
Capriccio marked something of a bridge between these two bodies of work. ‘I kept thinking about the difference between Venetian and French Rococo,’ explains Yukhnovich. ‘Venetian Rococo has a distinctive treatment of space which is logical, organised in planes like a theatre set.’ The artist had long admired the work of Tiepolo, but had struggled to reconcile it with her interests in French art. In Venice, however, she had the opportunity to observe his ceiling frescoes in the Ca’ Rezzonico museum and the Chiesa Santa Maria della Visitazione first-hand. ‘I wondered if I could knit the layers together using Tiepolo’s diagonal movements to collapse the space at points in the composition, bringing paint to the fore,’ she recalls. ‘I wanted it to feel as if it were undoing and reforming itself across the whole picture plain as well as in the figuration. This painting … combined with some of the French figures and fleshy forms I had looked at before, feels like a synthesis of what I learned in Venice and ideas I had been working on back home’ (artist statement, May 2020, Victoria Miro, online).
The present work is one of a number from the series titled after Italian musical terms. Yukhnovich realised that what ultimately linked the French and Italian Rococo styles was a sense of theatricality, manifested specifically in the latter through a ‘dance-like movement in the composition and the play of light.’ Tiepolo’s fresco in the Chiesa Santa Maria della Visitazione, she explains, was linked to the music school where Vivaldi worked. It was ‘made in response to that and is partly a celebration of music. When I saw it for the first time on my residency there, Tiepolo’s paintings and their relationship to the Rococo suddenly made sense to me. My eye seemed to ping around the painting as I moved underneath it, and with the help of the music, I began to understand it as choreography as much as composition. It made me think more about the role of the viewer and the way the eye travels around a painting’ (in conversation with N. Gonzalez Martin, op. cit.). These revelations simmer in the depths of the present work, its forms dancing across the surface like intricate lines of polyphony.