Giovanni Cavazzon


FRANCO BATACCHI
from Cavazzon at the Mill in the Dolomitic Rock: modern times respect the crib

Since I hate writing for the sake of writing and since I only write about artists who really interest me, my task was actually quite easy. As I was getting ready to write a “presentation” the one and only obstacle was that of overcoming the incipit, how to begin. From the hundreds of different perspectives, where was I going to start to make things readable and useful for the reader? The pleasure of getting involved in the works by Giovanni Cavazzon was overshadowed by this dilemma. The blank page on the computer awaited my impressions on a wonderful countryside, the well-known and familiar one of the hills surrounding the Mill in the Dolomite Rock (Molinetto della Croda).
Cavazzon lives in Udine, but was actually born in Lombardy: he then lived for a long time in the noble city ofParma. And his background is not made up of the vices and habits of Friulan and Veneto
 painters. I was afraid that my friend’s talent as a sketcher would have induced him to a highly descriptive analysis of landscapes. I discovered instead that – given the cycle of themes unusual for him – he was able to keep the story within that vital limit of evocation which represents the necessary threshold of poetic communication, and which one should not go beyond.
He placed great importance on expository locations – that miraculous apparition that seems to materialize from an eclogue by Andrea Zanzotto – where he exhibited “countrysides” which are not mere copies of real places: Cavazzon has recreated a new microcosm lacking any truth since all which is superfluous has been eliminated evoking the perfect reality in his and our imagination and thus establishing a line of communication.
Similar to the mill, Cavazzon has observed every little thing and everything he has seen and perceived has been finely ground. It would be very unlikely to have the chance to have a brief but so rich, precise and significant experience like this one. In the corner of the Nativity which is mirrored in the crystal pond at the foot of the waterfall, the modern world has quietly stepped in with all the due respect to the testimonies of the real story, which is not the bookish chronicles of dates and battles, but of the hard everyday heroisms of human toil.


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