Whereas her early work often took photography as starting point, the paintings of recent years are works on paper, frequently mounted on canvas. Caracciolo works intensively on her subject matter in various series, bearing titles such as 'Innocenti', 'Tempesta' and 'Figura' (2020), 'Combattere' and 'Esistenze' (2021), or 'Malinconia' and 'Sentiero' (2022). She works with graphite, oil pastels, tempera, pigments and chalk.
Caracciolo mainly draws and paints lines as delicate meshwork or with bold strokes. Sometimes they appear to be vigorously rendered, sometimes meticulously, gestural, restless, yet always deliberate. Her diverse artistic techniques are complemented by scratching away the upper layers of pigment or by collages of thin, differently coloured papers. This creates unfettered structures, sometimes with vaguely figurative references. The artist is inspired by paintings of the baroque masters, by Chinese calligraphy, but also by personal encounters and her perception and insights. Whether it is a matter of emotional experience, scenes from nature or pictorial history, or the artist’s imagination – Caracciolo also distills her models into signs in these bodies of work, and she uses them to develop her own, abstract language.
Caracciolo’s 'Costruzioni' are made of zinc sheets and conceived as solitary objects or as architecture-related installations. In them she pursues the same approach as in her drawings. She links zinc to relief shelters during the war in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and in her oeuvre it is symbolically charged with images of destruction, reconstruction and protection. The material with its matt opacity, scarred by time and weather, is reminiscent of works of Arte Povera, and acquires a special, profound meaning.
Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place, among others, at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; in the Temple Collection, Beijing (2016); in Château de Haroué, France (2012); the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici, Rome (2010); and in Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York (1999). Her works can be found in numerous private and public collections, such as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
