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STEFANIA
CAVAZZON
The
Venuses by Giovanni Cavazzon
This
is the first time, in the presence of the Venuses by Giovanni
Cavazzon, that we find ourselves beholding the bodies of women
without the slightest notion of irritation, or any lack of a
feeling of identity or pride of.
In some way they are of no
concern to us, unless seen within a dimension of art as a
phenomenon of pictorial and esthetic naturalness.
We see them
like the unveiled features of domestic animals, or galactic
vegetables, or alchemic metals, or beloved ABCs of life.
Perhaps
they help unravel the mystery behind nebulas or supernovas and
black holes (The
Summer and
The
Winter of Venus)
(L’Estate and L’Inverno di Venus).
They possess a grace
which is the very essence of matter itself, a grace generated by
astonishment of a formal effect, and also by that invisible energy
which all forms give off.
What we see is a sort of dialectic
analysis, perhaps speculation of a philosophical nature along the
contours a weavings of hands and peploses, within the precious
slowness of colour, or a sudden and total emotive acceleration. An
alienating factor is the contemplative curiosity we note, at times
even mystical, reaching out to the object’s shadow, simulacrum
simply to “move it” into a dimension of true beauty and not to
elude or substitute it.
The painter appears to be saying:
‹‹as far as the powers of my observations into the female
body, with all its limitations, can take me, I nevertheless regard
this as one of truth’s resolute aims››.
In a more
“poster-like” light, with a determined attitude for
twentieth-century satisfaction as well as exoteric and laid back,
and so to speak “mirrored”, these nude bodies remind us of the
bottles by Morandi. Perfectly tapered in sketch, but slightly
subdued and bent over in a concealed and parallel intuition which
is perceivable from amid the movements.
For sure, never have
nudes appeared so demure, as if striped of the frills of their
intrinsic organic unity, and never so veiled by an amnion of
water, air, fire or peat as if expelled and understood at the same
time by the elements which generated them.
They have a light
of their own, before the dawn of time, immortal, but very fragile
and uncertain.
They are solitary and discrete parts of a
terse and pulsating visual amplitude. The clear allusion to the
sculpturesque nude is merely food for thought only to show that
these Venuses express nothing as plastic and cemeterial and are
ageless. We would rather compare them, for example, to certain
“sudden absences”, from great Virgilian lyricism to the
melancholic lightness of Creùsa, or to the deflagrating
desperation of Dido, even with artistic citations and irony’s
use of modern and complex censorship.
In the end, they are
women and models, and in final analysis, almost out of gratitude.
And thus, devout and loyal portraits.
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