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LICIO
DAMIANI
Portraits
by Giovanni Cavazzon
The
historical avantguards of the twentieth century seem to have
eclipsed the art of portraits – intended as the ideal
representation of a person – in painting, sculpture and even in
photography. Photographers were often asked to produce portraits
for consumers, for reports or bureaucracy, to publish in
newspapers, or to be included in documents, or – at best – to
be handled like a fragment of that lost time that anyone of us
would like to recover. Painters abandoned any interest for
physiognomic likelihood (the cubist distortions and deformations
by Picasso are exemplary), but aimed at communicating the
psychological and emotional aura of the subject such as they
perceived it.
Nevertheless, the demand for the traditional
portrait has never declined, maybe because a painted portrait
seems to last longer, to have more dignity and nobility, and seems
to assure a greater freedom of interpretation with respect to
photography.
Those who pose know little of their own
appearance, as they live in the projection of the ideal of an
image that mirrors can confirm or, more often, deny. Therefore,
they wish to find the ideal image of themselves in the work of the
artist with whom they interweave a dialogue of expression from
within.
The radical changes in aesthetic research, the
assertion that “everything is art”, and the numerous
tendencies to revalue objectivity have brought out realistic
expression again. There is a growing number of people who love to
go back to the painted portrait non only for self-referential
satisfaction but also for a different intellectual way of looking
at painting.
And painting feeds on a plurality of autonomous
hybrids, with the heterogeneous contribution of the productive
world, publicity graphics and commercial arts. We can think of the
fetish-serialization by Andy Warhol, of the “high” revaluation
of comic-strips from an analytic and dilating perspective
(Liechtenstein); of the mimesisbetween
painting and mechanical data typical of photography and of other
mass languages of communication (hyper-realism, or the
reproduction of the masterpieces of the past, virtuosism close to
a quasi-metaphysical trompe-l’oeil).
The relation between
painting and photography has come closer and it seems to have
brought painting to that academic realism that preceded the
impressionist revolution or, at least, to adhere – often
polemically – to a diligent scrupulousness, questioning the myth
of technical perfection.
In this sense, the portraits by
Giovanni Cavazzon exemplify an extremely current new reading of
the classics. They are diaphanous like shades of an untouched and
faraway world; they shine with an unreal light in the musical
harmony of the drawing, proposing themselves like models of a
morganatic vision. Their absolute purity dissolves into illusion.
Colors develop a function of controcanto, becoming an evocative
note of their rarefied receding preciousness; or impressing on the
track of ancient references. The choice is never casual, but
inspired and suggested by the environment, the character, and the
psychological “tone” of the subject.
The
two Amodio sisters
seem
to mime the watercoloured aristocratic photo of the first
twentieth century in the emulsion of varnished phrasing of deep
blues, in the delicate brown chiaroscuros, in the soft silks and
velvets, in the bright pastel rosiness.
Emilia
reminds
us of Flemish atmospheres: the figure, embossed in the dark
background, pivots upon the face – mysterious and charming –
invested by light; the loose bangs of her long raven hair
reverberate with blue and part like a curtain revealing an
apparition; her elegant hands are languidly abandoned on her
knees; the emerald of her ring is another focus of visual
convergence.
A tense spirituality picks up the meditative
profile of Paola
Borboni.
The blond serpentine arpeggios of theSpring
and
of the Venus
by
Botticelli ruffle the windy hair of the
three Marson Sisters,
highlighting the fretting and capricious freshness of their
temperament. The volitive head of a Andrea
Marson imposes
itself with the proud quality of a portrait by Antonello da
Messina: the details of the shirt remind us of the coralline reds
of his palette.
The warm chromatic components of Nordic
ancestors dominate the Family
from Alto Adige,
echoing Brueghel.
The multiple images borrowed from
cinematographic dynamism confirm the eclectic rapinosity of
Cavazzon’s techniques. The painter doubles or triplicates the
faces in the same composition to catch the multiplicity of
expressions that go by in a flash. So you can see the sequence of
the
Three moments of Giorgio Celiberti,
delineated with pencils and sanguine: a limpid drawing of
Leonardesque mark. Or the
Triple portrait of the actor Gastone Moschin,
whose main lines remind us of the
Triple portrait of a goldsmith by
Lorenzo Lotto. Or, more, the winking strips of the Heads
of children,
of a transparent graphic. The resolution of the Portrait
of a Colombian girl brings
a length of film as its referential logo.
The Portrait
of the painter Gina Roma insists
on the semantic function of detail: on a neutral sheet there is a
non-finite close-up of her face, joyful with creativity; beneath,
according to a correlation which is not spatial but logical, we
find her hands, interlaced on the white working apron and, under,
her paintbrushes in a pot.
The delicate Portrait
of Barbara,
with her sweet lively glance, is an elegy to absolute beauty; is a
strong trace of angelical terrestrialness. This was created with a
purity of evanescent renaissance, sublimed by a flou effect,
almost to mimetically analyze the virtuosistic possibilities of
photographic technique.
The
Family of the football player Sensini
is
inserted in a “window”: the observer can draw at wish the true
curtain that defends their privacy. Cavazzon often inserts his
images in wooden boxes with titles that remind us of the
characters used by forwarding-agents: this leads to extraneity, to
distancing from the subject which is allusive of the process of
mercification of the artistic product. Cavazzon uses the same
syntactic expedient in his self-portrait, which is exemplary for
physiognomic and introspective characterization: the maniacal
reproduction of the municipal seal ironically “certifies” its
official existence, while the polystyrene framed underneath
alludes to a proposal of self-museification.
The
Accumulations
that
the French Arman obtained with color tubes, ball bearings,
billiard balls, piano and violin scraps, polemically told of the
triturated plot of contemporary consumerism. On the contrary, the
paintbrush that Cavazzon has placed in full view amidst rubbish
tells of his intention to react to any omologation and to state
his own creative identity.
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