Giovanni Cavazzon


DOMENICO DE STEFANO
from Cavazzon: art as a form of life

Giovanni Cavazzon has been around the world of art for almost thirty years. He is known most of all for his portraits of well-known figures, works which are born from the need to establish a more intimate relation with mankind.
Cavazzon’s full technical mastery always comes forth in his works: soft luministic effects, delicate transparencies through a masterful and delicate game of glazing, with acrylics, pencil, ink and with thin layers of highly diluted linen oil.
His activity as a scenographer in younger years, which has deeply influenced his painting and drawing, lies at the base of this study. This manifests itself in the rigorous attention he places on luminous phenomena, to light’s evanescence or solarity in order to create figures which are not mere copies of the original (Cavazzon is an artist).
The classical eurytmics in Cavazzon’s marvelous
Bacchantes (Baccanti) allow us a close-up view where we can grasp and understand in full the originality of his work: three figures are shrouded in an artificial and bewitching light with precious tones of red, orange and pink and immersed in an unreal setting as their ethereal beauty fades away. More generally, however, the subjects he prefers to portray are female figures (even nudes) with whom we establish a sort of intense visual dialogue so as to project our desires upon them.
A woman accepts to be portrayed in her more intimate light; is a symbol of the life and love that lie within her. Cavazzon searches for the most hidden sides in her eyes, which are tender and sensual at the same time.
Cavazzon the portraitist places himself in direct contact with life’s experiences and this comes out also in his male figures. Each of his characters reveals a past story with his own experiences. Here we find the soul of Cavazzon, who has never lived the present thinking about what was to come. He lives today turning to the past to better understand himself and to be able to look beyond with a renewed sense of faith. He sees art as a way of life par excellence.
Sketching has always been the base for his paintings (his sketches which dwell on some of the main themes of his art are indeed beautiful), even during his experience, which he likes to define as “informal”, during the late seventies. Cavazzon’s most recent works have focused on acrylic compositions, with oil and also ink, made on wooden boards or on paper where the intense and vibrant colours have a luminosity typically found in his acrylic painting.
The wish for immediacy and the desire for freedom, that sincere, vital and energetic contact with his brush, his spatula, his colours and stand have guided Cavazzon in his works to develop a faster and more immediate stroke, to create stimulating chromatic rhythms of contrapunto, so vital in their richness of precious, soft and ever-changing tonalisms, lighting up and turning off, and changeable in their chromatic hues. The artist deeply identifies with his work, so much so he is almost in a state of trance while painting or sketching, thus striking a true art and life binomial, forgetting all that surrounds him. However, in the end, his vitality is almost entirely dominated by his technical mastery. In his creations, Cavazzon has always elicited great interest both artistically and for his expressive force. In his most recent paintings (
Fence / Recinto, Wall / Muro, Window / Finestra,Nostalgia / Nostalgia, The Pumpkin / La zucca, Gate / Cancello) he has reached effects of greater formal synthesis and touched moments of high poetic intensity.


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