Everybody But Me

Coco Capitán makes work that sits right at the intersection of high concept and pure visual pleasure—colorful, textured, playful photographs that deal with identity and desire and the gap between how you see yourself and how the world sees you. The title alone is the whole thing. There’s something about the way she combines abstraction with personality, language with image, that makes you feel like you’re inside a private joke that somehow includes you. Her stuff has gotten more confident over time, less concerned with being understood and more interested in just being exactly what it is. That’s the move I keep watching for in contemporary work—the moment an artist stops performing their practice and just lives inside it.