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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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