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Giovanni Cavazzon |
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FANNI BINI The Venuses by Cavazzon This is the first time, in the
presence of the Venuses by Giovanni Cavazzon, that we find ourselves
beholding the bodies of women without the slightest notion of irritation, or any
lack of a feeling of identity or pride of. In some way they are of no concern
to us, unless seen within a dimension of art as a phenomenon of pictorial and
esthetic naturalness. We see them like the unveiled
features of domestic animals, or galactic vegetables, or alchemic metals, or
beloved ABCs of life. Perhaps they help unravel the
mystery behind nebulas or supernovas and black holes (The Summer and The Winter
of Venus) (L’Estate and L’Inverno di Venus). They possess a grace which is the
very essence of matter itself, a grace generated by astonishment of a formal
effect, and also by that invisible energy which all forms give off. What we see is a sort of dialectic
analysis, perhaps speculation of a philosophical nature along the contours a
weavings of hands and peploses, within the precious slowness of colour, or a
sudden and total emotive acceleration. An alienating factor is the
contemplative curiosity we note, at times even mystical, reaching out to the
object’s shadow, simulacrum simply to “move it” into a dimension of true
beauty and not to elude or substitute it. The painter appears to be saying:
‹‹as far as the powers of my observations into the female body, with all its
limitations, can take me, I nevertheless regard this as one of truth’s resolute
aims››. In a more “poster-like” light, with
a determined attitude for twentieth-century satisfaction as well as exoteric
and laid back, and so to speak “mirrored”, these nude bodies remind us of the
bottles by Morandi. Perfectly tapered in sketch, but slightly subdued and
bent over in a concealed and parallel intuition which is perceivable from
amid the movements. For sure, never have nudes appeared
so demure, as if striped of the frills of their intrinsic organic unity, and
never so veiled by an amnion of water, air, fire or peat as if expelled and
understood at the same time by the elements which generated them. They have a light of their own,
before the dawn of time, immortal, but very fragile and uncertain. They are solitary and discrete parts
of a terse and pulsating visual amplitude. The clear allusion to the
sculpturesque nude is merely food for thought only to show that these Venuses
express nothing as plastic and cemeterial and are ageless. We would rather
compare them, for example, to certain “sudden absences”, from great Virgilian
lyricism to the melancholic lightness of Creùsa, or to the deflagrating
desperation of Dido, even with artistic citations and irony’s use of modern
and complex censorship. In the end, they are women and models,
and in final analysis, almost out of gratitude. And thus, devout and loyal
portraits. |
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