What happens when everything blurs together—images, moments, and ideas—leaving you too overwhelmed to truly see? Coco Capitán’s If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes is a thoughtful response to that question. Published in 2019, the book invites readers to pause, reflect, and reimagine their engagement with a fast-paced, visually saturated world. Far from being outdated, Capitán’s work feels prescient, a touchstone for navigating modern chaos.

Coco Capitán is an artist who thrives on contradictions. Born in Seville, Spain, and trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, she’s a photographer, writer, and visual thinker whose work often resists easy categorization. While she gained international attention through collaborations with Gucci—her hand-scrawled aphorisms like “What are we going to do with all this future?” becoming cultural phenomena—her art reveals a deeply personal, reflective practice. That intimacy is captured beautifully in the book.

The book is a curated mix of handwritten text, photography, and musings on identity, time, and how we consume and project ourselves. At first, Capitán’s aphorisms were dismissed by some as too brief or simplistic. But in today’s fragmented world, their economy of language feels more like precision. Her work isn’t about offering answers—it’s about asking the right questions.

The pages of If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes unfold like fragments of a dream. Capitán pairs poetic scribbles with photography that shifts between stark urban landscapes and quiet, voyeuristic portraits. Her handwriting—imperfect and unpolished—adds an intimate layer, as if these were personal notes shared directly with the reader. Every page feels transient, offering fragments rather than conclusions, a reflection of our fleeting, oversaturated reality.

Her phrases, such as “I’ve spent most of my life worrying about things that never happened,” hold a deceptive simplicity. They demand attention—not to be skimmed but to be absorbed, leaving space for the reader to fill in the gaps. Capitán anchors us to the present in a world of endless scrolling.

In If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes, Capitán challenges us to rethink identity and how we navigate a culture dominated by imagery. Her words and photographs ask piercing questions: How much of ourselves is shaped by what we consume? How much is a projection molded by the gaze of others? These are familiar concerns, yet Capitán’s diaristic approach makes them feel raw, urgent, and personal.

This duality runs through both her art and her career. Capitán’s high-profile collaborations with luxury brands like Gucci place her in the spotlight of commercial art. At the same time, her work critiques consumerism and questions perfection. Rather than resolving this tension, she leans into it, creating art that mirrors our own contradictions.

If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes feels even more urgent now than when it was first released. Capitán’s call to “close your eyes” isn’t about retreating from the world; it’s an invitation to recalibrate, to find meaning amid the noise. Her brevity reflects the speed of our era, but her intention is the opposite. Capitán wants us to linger, to dwell in those short phrases and fragmented images. She shows that simplicity can be profound and that sometimes, less really is more.

Some critics argue that her aphorisms lack depth or that her fashion-world connections dilute her credibility as an artist. But this misses the point. Capitán’s work thrives in the spaces between certainty and contradiction. Her brevity creates room for interpretation, and her commercial partnerships highlight the very systems she critiques. Rather than rejecting the frameworks she operates within, she holds up a mirror to them, forcing us to confront the contradictions we often ignore.

Capitán invites us to pause, to question, and to look inward. Her contradictions—between commercial success and introspection, brevity and depth—mirror our own struggles in navigating a hyper-visual, fast-paced world.

In a culture that prizes speed and spectacle, Capitán’s work is a rare kind of antidote. It reminds us that sometimes the most radical thing we can do is stop, reflect, and truly see.