Deeper meaning surfaces from Caio Fonseca

Few abstract artists do the weather-beaten surface as well as the 50-year-old Uruguayan-American painter Caio Fonseca. Every painting is a painting hidden underneath another painting, a layer of worn creamy hues covering a colourful set of stripes and swooshes exposed through oddly shaped windows.

The pictures look like the wooden hulls of old rowing boats — an evocative layering of one paint surface over another, a spattering of brightly coloured droplets delivered with the flick of the brush, or a rough surface rubbed with wax and marked with carefully built-up ridges.

Fonseca has an established place at the more glittering end of the New York art world. His pictures have been bought by the Whitney and Metropolitan, he is brother-in-law to Martin Amis (who turned up at the opening of the show), while his father was well-known sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca.

The biography is almost too good to be true, and while the calculated loucheness of Fonseca’s style may be a bit too fashionable for some, it is effective in its themes. Motifs like the strange scuffed diagonal patterns may make you think of old maps, or the strange markings left on the landscape by an extinguished Latin American culture. In this way, Fonseca’s textures and techniques evoke nostalgia, forgetting and remembering.
Until 22 May (020 7734 8888,
www.benbrownfinearts.com).

Caio Fonseca
Ben Brown Fine Arts, W1