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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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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”.
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