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Giovanni Cavazzon |
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LICIO DAMIANI Portraits
By Giovanni Cavazzon The historical avantguards of the
twentieth century seem to have eclipsed the art of portraits – intended as the
ideal representation of a person – in painting, sculpture and even in
photography. Photographers were often asked to produce portraits for
consumers, for reports or bureaucracy, to publish in newspapers, or to be
included in documents, or – at best – to be handled like a fragment of that
lost time that anyone of us would like to recover. Painters abandoned any
interest for physiognomic likelihood (the cubist distortions and deformations
by Picasso are exemplary), but aimed at communicating the psychological and
emotional aura of the subject such as
they perceived it.
Nevertheless, the demand for the traditional portrait has
never declined, maybe because a painted portrait seems to last longer, to
have more dignity and nobility, and seems to assure a greater freedom of
interpretation with respect to photography. Those who pose know little of their own appearance, as they
live in the projection of the ideal of an image that mirrors can confirm or,
more often, deny. Therefore, they
wish to find the ideal image of
themselves in the work of the artist with whom they interweave a dialogue of
expression from within. The radical changes in aesthetic research, the assertion
that “everything is art”, and the numerous tendencies to revalue objectivity
have brought out realistic expression again. There is a growing number of people who love to go
back to the painted portrait non only for
self-referential satisfaction but also for a different intellectual
way of looking at painting. And painting feeds on a plurality of autonomous hybrids,
with the heterogeneous contribution of the productive world, publicity graphics and commercial arts. We can think of the
fetish-serialization by Andy Warhol, of the “high” revaluation of
comic-strips from an analytic and dilating perspective (Liechtenstein); of
the mimesis between painting and
mechanical data typical of photography and of other mass languages of
communication (hyper-realism, or the reproduction of the masterpieces of the
past, virtuosism close to a quasi-metaphysical trompe-l’oeil). The relation between painting and photography has come
closer and it seems to have brought painting to that academic realism that
preceded the impressionist revolution or, at least, to adhere – often
polemically – to a diligent scrupulousness, questioning the myth of technical
perfection. In this sense, the portraits by Giovanni Cavazzon exemplify
an extremely current new reading of the classics. They are diaphanous like
shades of an untouched and faraway world; they shine with an unreal light in
the musical harmony of the drawing, proposing themselves like models of a
morganatic vision. Their absolute purity dissolves into illusion. Colors
develop a function of controcanto, becoming an evocative note of their
rarefied receding preciousness; or impressing on the track of ancient
references. The choice is never casual, but
inspired and suggested by the environment, the character, and the
psychological “tone” of the subject. The two Amodio
sisters seem to mime the watercoloured aristocratic photo of the
first twentieth century in the emulsion of varnished phrasing of deep blues,
in the delicate brown chiaroscuros, in the soft silks and velvets, in the
bright pastel rosiness. Emilia reminds us of
Flemish atmospheres: the figure, embossed in the dark background, pivots upon
the face – mysterious and charming – invested by light; the loose bangs of
her long raven hair reverberate with blue and part like a curtain revealing
an apparition; her elegant hands are languidly abandoned on her knees; the
emerald of her ring is another focus of visual convergence. A tense spirituality picks up the meditative profile of Paola Borboni. The blond serpentine
arpeggios of the Spring and of the Venus by Botticelli ruffle the windy
hair of the three Marson Sisters,
highlighting the fretting and
capricious freshness of their temperament.
The volitive head of a Andrea Marson
imposes itself with the proud quality of a portrait by Antonello da Messina: the
details of the shirt remind us of the coralline reds of his palette. The warm chromatic components of Nordic ancestors dominate
the Family from Alto Adige, echoing
Brueghel. The multiple images borrowed from cinematographic dynamism confirm the eclectic
rapinosity of Cavazzon’s techniques. The painter doubles or triplicates the
faces in the same composition to catch the multiplicity of expressions that
go by in a flash. So you can see the sequence of the Three moments of Giorgio Celiberti, delineated with pencils
and sanguine: a limpid drawing of Leonardesque mark. Or the Triple portrait of the actor Gastone Moschin, whose main
lines remind us of the Triple portrait
of a goldsmith by Lorenzo Lotto. Or, more, the winking strips of the Heads of children, of a transparent
graphic. The resolution of the Portrait
of a Colombian girl brings a
length of film as its referential logo. The Portrait of the
painter Gina Roma insists on the semantic function of detail: on a
neutral sheet there is a non-finite close-up of her face, joyful with
creativity; beneath, according to a correlation which is not spatial but
logical, we find her hands, interlaced on the white working apron and, under,
her paintbrushes in a pot. The delicate Portrait
of Barbara, with her sweet lively glance, is an elegy to absolute beauty;
is a strong trace of angelical terrestrialness. This was created with a
purity of evanescent renaissance,
sublimed by a flou effect, almost to mimetically analyze the virtuosistic
possibilities of photographic
technique. The Family of
the football player Sensini is inserted in a “window”: the observer
can draw at wish the true curtain that
defends their privacy. Cavazzon often inserts his images in wooden boxes with
titles that remind us of the characters used by forwarding-agents: this leads
to extraneity, to distancing from the
subject which is allusive of the process of mercification of the artistic
product. Cavazzon uses the same syntactic expedient in his self-portrait,
which is exemplary for physiognomic and introspective characterization: the
maniacal reproduction of the municipal seal ironically “certifies” its
official existence, while the polystyrene framed underneath alludes to a
proposal of self-museification. The Accumulations
that the French Arman obtained with color tubes, ball bearings, billiard
balls, piano and violin scraps, polemically told of the triturated plot of
contemporary consumerism. On the contrary, the paintbrush that Cavazzon has
placed in full view amidst rubbish tells of his intention to react to any
omologation and to state his own creative identity. |
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