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Giovanni Cavazzon |
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OTTORINO STEFANI The
Birth of Venus by Giovanni Cavazzon “When the Venetians talked about
art, they did so to refine their sensuality and not to discover the
scientific truth that lay behind it as did the Florentines. We often forget
that the great sixteenth century Venetian painting started with the nude Sleeping
Venus by Giorgione”. The words spoken by Venturi
underline, yet again, the importance of the work by Giorgione not only in the
sphere of Venetian painting during the Renaissance, but also as a fundamental
point of reference to understand the ensuing developments in modern painting
and above all in representing a universal idea of beauty. Canova, for
example, was so much in love with Giorgione’s paintings (Venus in
particular), that he created “fakes” and showed them to his friends telling
them they were originals. Besides, we must not forget that
the Canovian Venuses are the results of inspired works in the elaboration of
models going as far back as the Greeks. His esthetic vision can therefore be
defined as “postmodern”. The painter Giovanni Cavazzon is also presently
involved in this. He has focused his attention on the subject of these
Venuses with a style and mark that can be considered Giorgionesque, but
Canovian above all. At the beginning, the ideal Beauty
for Canova materializes in few works such as Apollo Crowning Himself (Apollo
che si incorona) and The Prince Henry Lubomirski as Eros (Il Principe Henry
Lubomirski come Eros). Androgynous beauty is exalted in these works (in vogue
around the world nowadays), and theorized by Winckelmann as well. A beauty
which has a sense of expressive and sensual naturalness, reaching the highest
expression of sculpture of all time with the last Venus, sculpted between
1817-20. The Birth of Venus (La nascita di
Venere) by Giovanni Cavazzon ideally picks up Canovan ‘s style with the last
Venus, shedding light on “true flesh”, barely missed by the “Vague Beauty”
which, according to Kant, is Beauty created by the artist’s free-wheeling
creativity, and therefore, rediscovered as a “dream in the presence of
reason”. Cavazzon makes this dream “visible”
in his Venus as she “soars” between heaven and earth, symbolizing eternal
love. By means of refined chromatic harmony, he portrays the goddess of
Beauty on the verge of dissolving in the changing light of day like a light cloud
“full of narrated dreams” and secret Leopardian aspirations, evoking the
sweet sensations of shipwrecking in the endless kingdom of Eros. Surely, this eroticism is not
enveloped by a Freudian “return to the shadows”, but suffused by a permeating
sweetness of symbolic motifs. This can be traced back to a variety of
suggestions from the historical avant-gardes: from Pop Art to the Lettrism
movement, from the poetry of Surrealism to Ready-made. An expression for the
latter are the densely packed green and blue polystyrene balls alluding to a
hypothetical ocean floor in The Birth of Venus. The pictorial vision of Giovanni
Cavazzon is most certainly the fruit of an authentic cultural education
which, at times, takes on a “nobly academic” tone. However, it is the
artist’s own refined experience which transforms the language in The Birth of
Venus into the “Dwelling of the Being”. As Croce once said, “all one’s
knowledge is potentially implicit in one’s primitive (esthetic) intuition”. |
OTTORINO
STEFANI From: “Arte Triveneta – dal barocco alle ultime
ricerche del duemila (Art from Triveneto - from Baroque to the latest in 21st century
research)” Giovanni Cavazzon ushers us once again into the “sublime”
myth of Venus. Beauty is seen as an auroral source of life, generating
fertile thoughts, unconscious desires, and exciting erotic vitality. One
might say that it is this very myth to stretch across the entire span of art
history. Among other contemporary artists we have the nudes by Marussig,
summoning a ‘return to order’, Renzo Biasion’s nudes are often depicted
within a sensual climate of erotic discovery, and Plattner’s are deformed
with an almost perverse and decadent taste. The Venuses by Cavazzon present
themselves with connotations suspended among cultivated artistic citations
(Tom Wesselmann) and the provocative force of the female nude depicted as
supreme erotic provocation, along the lines of the great Ingres. A
“postmodern” provocation but active and filtered by an out-of-the-ordinary
philosophical background. For this reason Licio Damiani writes that in the
“recreation of beauty” by Giovanni Cavazzon there is a “subtle game of make
believe, of references, and irony at times as well. Romanticism, extreme and
formal purity, a desire to play, perfect artistic citations to the point of
virtuosity, and the parody of memory. In the marvelous Venuses by Giovanni
Cavazzon art turns to itself, exhibiting and confuting itself setting off a
sophisticated process of mental speculation”. Mental speculation which is,
however, an “intellectual gesture” in order to be able to conceal the
original impulse: the exaltation of eros created in a supreme manner by
“integral realism”, in the famous painting The Origin of the World (L’origine
du monde) by Courbet in 1866, where Sgarbi says, “we have finally seen the
coming of contemporary art, of the desacration and representation of sex as
pure pleasure, instant and stunning sensuality.” |
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