In Deep Cuts III (Visceral) (2015), Yoan Capote constructs a seascape across two laminate cutting boards, allowing incisions and blood to assume the delicacy of drawing. A continuous horizon organizes the surfaces, while the boards’ handles preserve their unmistakable domestic identity. The eye moves between a kitchen implement and an expanse of water, between the recognition of damage and the pleasure of representation. Each mark participates in both conditions: a cut becomes a wave without ceasing to be a cut. The blood lends this transformation a bodily consequence. What initially appears to be the restrained coloration of a landscape is a substance whose presence implies the opening of flesh.

The cutting board introduces an uncomfortable intimacy into this encounter. It belongs to the daily preparation of nourishment, a practice in which cutting, dividing, and dismembering become ordinary gestures of care. Its surface is expected to withstand the blade; accumulated damage scarcely interferes with its usefulness. Capote’s choice permits a reading of endurance stripped of its customary heroism. A surface can remain functional while continuing to receive injury, just as a life can sustain its routines under conditions that gradually diminish it. The title’s “deep cuts” consequently reaches beyond the physical depth of an incision. It suggests the extent to which repeated, apparently manageable injuries can enter the organization of everyday existence.

Read within Capote’s Cuban context, the sea brings this domestic vulnerability into contact with the geography of separation. The horizon offers the prospect of elsewhere, yet the substance through which it becomes visible makes that prospect inseparable from bodily exposure. Bringing the ocean onto cutting boards also brings the border into the household: departure, distance, and the possibility of loss inhabit the same intimate space as the preparation of a meal. The pale restraint of the image intensifies this proximity. There is no depicted body to identify, no episode whose conclusion would contain the disturbance. Blood remains dispersed through the landscape, making the sea itself carry the evidence of vulnerability.