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MARTA
DI BENEDETTO
from
Giovanni
Cavazzon
Giovanni
Cavazzon, who in reality is a scenographer, was an art teacher
until 1987. He graduated in Parma
in
1960. He has been active in the field of art for over thirty
years. His first pictorial experiments were in the field of manual
scenography building panels and backdrops for theater.
It is
the setting of a stage character which marks the start of his
study into the pictorial portrayals of figures. Taken while posing
directly, his first models were bathers along the beaches in
Bibione, ordinary people caught while living out their everyday
lives. A portraitist on commission is born. Still today he
portrays figures, more or less famous, from the world of
theater.
Aside from the individual’s social importance, the
artist captures the personality of the person portrayed, going
beyond the photograph, and bringing to life a gallery of
psychologically characterized images.
What we see are true
works of art which dwell on the study of people and which are not
simply mercenary portraits. One quick look at his pictorial cycles
and we understand that Giovanni Cavazzon possesses a well-defined,
consolidated personality as an artist. His Venuses, for example,
are the fruit of a conscious process of thought on Venus as a
classic figure, as a goddess, but not only, with continuous
erudite references and personal observations. From the marble
statue to the figure in flesh and bones of the model, Venus is the
essence of women, the mother of femininity, the very symbol of
what female sex represents: life.
Beauty comes to life inside
wooden crates with polystyrene on the bottom. The allusion is to
transferring works of art from one museum to another along with
playing a subtle game of irony on mythical figures full of erudite
references. This marks the beginning of the many tributes to
masterpieces of the past, such as The
Bather of Valpinçon
(Le
Baigneuse Valpinçon)
by Ingres and the nude by Manet in his Luncheon
on the Grass
(Déjeuneur
sur l’herbe).
Not very conventional references if we look at Luncheon
on the Grass
(Colazione
sull’erba)
by Giovanni Cavazzon, where Manet’s lunch is reduced to an apple
cut out of plywood and buried in a layer of polystyrene. And
similarly in Venus
at the Bath
(Venere
al bagno)
a self-confident looking woman is peacefully smoking a
cigarette.
Cavazzon is a painter between memory and modern
times, as are his works between a pictorial genre which is pure
and simple and the installation. Indeed, many of his works have
real thickness, given the presence of polystyrene and cut out
plywood added to the frames of open crates. Just think of Paris
and Aphrodite, for example, similar to the following Apollo and
Daphne, where the male figures are placed along the outer limits
of the painting, with an attempt to characterize through their
different material consistency man’s real extraneousness with a
woman’s world.
From the commissioned portraits to the more
personal works, Cavazzon never ceases to make the claim that the
portrayed subject can become a possession of the painting, living
within it, and turning it into the real portrayal of an image of
the mind, created by the painter’s imagination.
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