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Giovanni Cavazzon |
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PIETRO MASTROMONACO Women and Cavazzon’s art The long history of mankind is
permeated by the myth of women with their charming, mysterious, and
disquieting aura: from the Paleolithic Venuses to the female deities of Olympus,
be they Greek or Hindu, from the Vergine Mary of Christianity to the
angel-like “stil novo” creatures, all the way to the sublime and perverse
heroines during the Romanticism and Decadentism. In literature as in
painting, portrayals undergo continual change covering every possible imagery
with the length and breath of symbolic meanings. Even Cavazzon has been
smitten by this myth. In his work he nears obsession in trying to relate to
women, beings who bring us life, the emblems of eros, offering himself, like
Venus, in all her sacral significance. What follows is indeed a very hard
operation because the artist is willfully inclined to a synthesis so as to
project us beyond space and time to capture the essence behind all female
representations. And so we have the Venuses
re-emerging from the crates with all their splendor, liberated from all the
waste and life’s contingencies, which have always prevented a clear vision to
those who do not have the power of observation. Venus Cerulean Venus Rose (Venus
Cerulea Venus rosea), Venus Ivory (Venus eburnea) …, names which bring
together Pagan and Christian elements, stunning beauty, and which at the same
time redeems and invokes as in litanies. But Venus the woman, even
disquieting in her beauty, like all beauties, always carries ambiguity and
duplicity, and is capable of sending us spiraling away into contradiction.
The solar Venuses, luminously vibrant and lying in peace and quiet, are set
against the nocturnal and lunar Venuses of Venus night and day. Their faces
and bodies lie in the obscure and ambiguous shadow of seduction. Only their
bosoms, in sinful offer, shine in the light. There are contradictory elements
even in The Summer and The Winter of Venus (L’Estate and L’Inverno di Venus).
The woman becomes the emblem of time and the beats of nature. From the
blazing magma of indefinity emerges a powerfully vital creature only to later
bend and wither away as an old woman, and as she stoops to grab a branch,
almost as if she did not want to get lost by immersing herself in a new
existence, whereby a new cycle of life commences. Woman, the symbol for the
seasons, for time and for the eternal perpetuating of our being. Cavazzon takes us to the roots of
life with his portrayals, but which, at the same time, can free us by casting
us into the spell of an intangible dream. His women rise pure, float like
evanescent phantoms as if to insinuate “the unbearable lightness of our
existence”. We do not find backgrounds or architecture in his works, only
some blue streaks and soft diffuse light, a space beyond the story where only
mythical creatures enveloped in their luminous nudity stir. Sheets are the
only things covering the limbs, allowing us to capture their soft and vibrant
sensuality, perceptible to sight and almost to touch. Only the telluric
woman, referring to The Summer of Venus, comes out lit up, excited, almost in
a delirium of the eros, with rivulets of hair on her shoulders like the first
weavings and features of life. However, the Venuses are the fruit
of imagination, whatever their meaning may be. It is not only the painter’s
tribute to Ingres and Manet, but an example of how beauty can project in the
mind and in one’s imagination while being recreated over and over again by
the artist and Cavazzon the man, a being of circumstance, able to project
himself to create and represent all that we know as sublime. |
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