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Giovanni Cavazzon |
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GIORGIO BELLEDI Portraits
(Bringing Out). The making of a portrait. The process of bringing out anew.
Perhaps helping to give birth again. But is that our clone, brought out, framed and hanging on a
wall? It looks like us, but are we struck by a sense of amazement? Perhaps it
is a long-lost brother. Or, a mirror lacking discretion? “Do not accuse your mirror if your face is crooked!”, said
Gogol; and even if a mirror at times shows benevolence, we are still struck
by a light sense of extraneity. Is that what we really look like? Do people
see us like that? We carry our image around forgetting how much it says about
us. “We are naked masks”, said Pirandello, and Cocteau (I believe) added:
“After forty we are all responsible
for our own faces”. Actually, and only recently a heightened awareness of
one’s appearance has developed. For some, this awareness has led to
obsession: resorting to cosmetics, face-lifts, liposuction and the miracles of plastic surgery. What we
often fear the most is not looking older or less beautiful, but what the
portrait reveals of us and of our innermost existential drive. And this is
particularly at risk when the artist behind the portrait is Giovanni
Cavazzon. His mark: so fine, so delicate, so embellishing; traced
with a superlative technique; of airy and charming neoclassicism. Expression
is tainted with charm; concealing and revealing both character and person.
Like any good biographer, he tells the story of a person, of his services to
the world, his aspirations, his social status, his family and the role
assigned to him by society. These portraits should be read with care: a
fleeting glance, a bitter fold, a disarming thoughtfulness, a challenging
attitude, a hairstyle, a detail tells us more about the character than the
person. Giovanni Cavazzon has long been a frequenter of Friuli and its
settings, and year after year his portraits appear like the Human Comedy of a
well-identifiable society with all its peculiarities, with its myths and its
rites, vices and virtues, sweetness, obstinacies and humorous sides. One
might be led to think that Cavazzon’s aim was to stage a miniature world, to
set up a small theatre, to tell about those who – around him – live, work and
dream, all with great respect and loving attention, but also with a touch of
ironic perplexity. Perhaps only the children appear as and remain what they
are. The innocence in their eyes absolves them from all judgement, even
though in some multiple portraits we grasp and foresee a destiny not much
different from the one assigned to their parents. Then we have a few portraits of popular people, such as
politicians, businessmen, actors and football players. Instead of adding the
artist here has taken away. He has represented these people – who are
characters present in the minds of many
– in their unadorned familiarity, far from the limelight, without
make-up or star-like attitudes and for once Mr or Ms nobody. The painter, whoever he might be, when depicting others is
telling about himself. When reading these portraits we also discover a lot of
the man who created them. This hand so suprising both for technical skill and
wisdom of space, is guided by the hand of a man who cares deeply for mankind.
His pictorial technique can be defined as “amorous”, in love with the
subjects he paints; a curious and sharp observer who is able to capture the
impulses of the souls of his creatures. This technique belongs to a man who
is deeply in love with his profession, driven by an innermost urgency to fix
on canvas the visible and the hidden world that surrounds him and that
strikes his sharp artistic sensitivity. |
Giorgio
Belledi from All Around Venus Beautiful female bodies have always symbolized Aphrodite and
Venus, the goddesses of beauty and love. Bodies which become the object of
desire, the creation of amorous desire, where their unveiling, undressing,
thickens rather than weakens the mystery of sensuous love. Cavazzon is on a quest for the female body. He is in search
of Venus, the most mysterious of all goddesses. His quest starts with those
splendid drawings leading to the big acrylic Venuses unveiled and liberated
from those modern crates and the protective polystyrene; Venus is exhibited
and labeled: Venus Cerulean, Venus Rose, Venus Ivory, Venus
Mixta, The Birth of Venus (La Nascita di Venus). We do not know where Cavazzon discovered these Venuses.
Perhaps they were old frescoes embellishing the homes of nobles, taken down
and restored with a taste for the modern, and then labeled as goods ready to
be used to bring a refined touch of antiquity to the gelid décor of banks
encased in glass, cement and steel. Perhaps the painter, after imagining and
creating her, tries to remove the charm which these seductive female figures
possess with a touch of irony and sense of detachment. The later hypothesis
is confirmed in the two oil paintings where Cavazzon pays a tribute to two
great artists of the past, Ingres and Manet, who took on the female nude
before he did. However, a subtle parodistic game accompanies this admirable
tribute. Using this as a shield, Giovanni Cavazzon can abandon himself to the
pleasure of creating an object of desire in a nude woman. A real modern day
woman, who willingly undresses to have her portrait made, so as to be
admired, to elicit that voyeuristic pleasure of our contemplation. The journey continues with four nudes, two are mirror
images of the other two, like black and white copies or negative and positive
images, like day and night, like sleeping and waking, like physicality and
erotic imagination. Four flashes of memory, four icons of female nudes, four
syntheses of male imagination. The existential biological journey in The Summer and The
Winter of Venus (L’Estate and L’Inverno
di Venus) may help us to discover more about women. The pleasure for
pictorial expressiveness in his paintings prevails over all other
considerations in these two works with mixed techniques. The painter lets
himself go to a flow of emotions. The female body becomes nature. It takes on
the colours of the earth, of the seasons, it swells with the short-lived
happiness of every living being, it captures the touching emotions of the
unmistakable signs of the unavoidable end of the flow of life, which is common
destiny to both men and women. Venus, hence, is a body to cherish. It is ours as in The Creation of Venus
(La creazione di Venus). The painter and model theme is revisited in an
autobiographical note through paintings narrating Giovanni Cavazzon’s appropriation,
as an artist, of the body of his beloved woman. Liberation at last. The end
of a journey in quest of that fleeting image of the Goddess Venus, so
desired, so mysterious, but who he has finally found by piecing together her
fragments through love. |
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