Cinema Folia

Ernesto Caivano, like Kai Althoff, Matthew Ritchie, Matthew Barney, and several other contemporary artists, is using the pluralist field cleared of earlier painful critical ideologies to create an individualized cosmology – specifically a universe that is both romantically medieval and science fictionally futuristic.  His meditative images, in their many manifestations, but through a precise set of drawing techniques are a constantly changing storyboard whose backstory he keeps filling in, deferring the ending, endlessly.  Esoteric, cryptic, enigmatic, and organic, the script’s characters sustain their iconic presence as a knight and a princess in a boy meets girl, girl and boy are separated, and girl and boy try to reunite in a traditional plot trajectory (think Adam and Eve, Romeo and Juliet, etc., etc.).  However, in Caivano’s obsessive pulsating narrative or more accurately, braided narrative, the knight errant has returned in time to a time before the Renaissance where he emerges from a semantic chaos to influence the growth of plants.  The princess has already evolved into a future where she is a spaceship who advances technological elements to form new intelligences. Their mutual yearning for each other and for each other’s bodies/spirits drives the story and the environment forwards and backwards in an alchemical oscillation from one time and place to another in a cycle of desire.

Another way of saying this is that Caivano’s denial of narrative closure allows him to draw a metaphor for art itself – an incessantly deferred complete meaning which would come with conclusions - in favor of information loaded moments of transformation.  Clearly, in his densely pollinated graphic universe, meaning is random and unreconciled until decisions are made.  This is a deliberately existential space of artistic practice that allows him to play out his imagination around the pervasive question of art and science – how to make visible the invisible.  How to re-present. It also allows him to picture an innovative origin myth which is neither religious nor scientific – neither poetic nor technical – neither natural nor artificial - but one which poses the relativity of each to each other. The doubt that is at the center of the story is the doubt that informs each drawing to be made in tribute to the optimism of the idea of transformation and transformation in and of itself.   Alternate realities are essential to ground the “real”.

The drawings are organic, geometric - often symmetrical – charged occasionally with color that seems urgent – mysterious images, both accessible and alluding baroque traditions.  Like the information they reference, the drawings are profuse with teleportation – a notion of contradictory communication which is like snow – falling everywhere different and in transit, but which together, suggests an environment with prescribed design – a metaphor for nanotechnology, stealth, and achievement. The interaction of the man and the woman in Caivano’s sphere viewed at a microscopic/genetic level - trees align themselves influenced by antiquated codes of order to re-create the princess, environments that conjure seismic architectures and precarious communication traces - vividly suggest a cinema of Don Quixotian proportions – grand gestures of illusions – dystopian plans, and misguided heroics. Yet, at the heart of these drawings lies not only the ache of desire, but also the hope of its thousand-year frustration completed in an embrace that is mutual and satisfying. The scenes are set, the actors and extras are in place, the lights are on, the shots are being considered and even as the backstory comes to the fore, the editor is considering the order – the way in which this story can be experienced without losing the uncertain struggle which underlies art – that no amount of knowledge is ever enough.

And so, Caivano expands the opus After the Woods, by introducing another chapter called Games for a Blackout Machine, with a look into the trajectory and process of disappearance, from the schemes and scale of the physical whole to the realms and communication systems of the alchemically ordered components. Blackout Machine is a metaphor for the process that takes place when we try to view and understand the world around us.  They are two ways to perceive and understand the world around us, by intuitive relationships, which is more of an organic manifestation relating more to the idea of rhizomatic tendencies, and molecular distributions; the other way to perceive is through scientific/logic based which tends to take apart the whole to a division or microscopic version.  As with the advent of technology, the fields of perception and physically useful spaces are expanding both to the macro and microscopic areas.  Nano technology for the small, and a satellite sent to orbit Pluto.  The relationships of scale become more abstract with the progress of both privileged views.  Stemming from these ideas.  The work Caivano is showing addresses the interplay and gestalt of the inner workings of the characters in After the Woods.  It’s a scientific, and organic dissection of the elements that exist at another scale, like cells in our bodies, but these new drawings present the dissected as a present entity dealing in systems of communications.  In the history of technology inspired by baroque ornamentation arching to the present forms of stealth design.  What forms were prevalent in the Baroque era transform from the princess dress to her armor, to her shell and to become eventually her spaceship.  It’s the transition from being physical to the blackout and loss of body as a transfer of information echoed in the progress of filigree ornamentation to the symmetry of planes and spaceships.  In the drawings, nature assumes part of this logic and splits, referencing mitosis and cell divisions. The land mirrors itself at times but has a sense of longing to understand it’s opposite by mimicry, as if two languages were spoken, one must find the common link to relate on the most basic level, stripping away idiosyncrasies in preference of common denominators of communication.  In some cases, drawings will attempt to mimic and recreate the body of the princess using branches, leaves, debris, etc.  All the drawings are inter- related as they expand views of each other like a detail or caption or stills from a very slow navigation. 

In the show Caivano invites us to inspect and discover the cross-pollination of elements as they define the process of transformation between the romantic past of flowers and ornament to the present harder and colder remove of the human element in such things as stealth technology, where the form completely hides its function and although this notion of form follows function from the Bauhaus movement.  I think it’s safe to say that new technologies, not only conceal its function, it also conceals the human scale, much in the same way that our brain really has no scale for thought, other than what we can manifest in the physical world.  Technology, especially, the areas most supported by the military infrastructure of advancement is encouraged to remove people from its presence and make it more virtual and remote.  And so, Games for a Blackout Machine is in the narrative a look into the transformation of a princess into a spaceship at a microscopic level, and organic level.  It’s her resurrection from the past to the future.  It’s a disappearance of body and maybe a satirical view of what we’ve come to understand as the spirit.  It the spirit or soul is the invisible force not contained by the body, then maybe these new technologies are mimicking our visualizations of what it is to be without body.  In the union of two people, in the moment of conception of two cells, mitosis takes place, instant replication and cell division.  At the physical level two have become joined as one, at the microscopic level one is becoming two, and then splitting again, endlessly until we have normally the result of a newborn one body with a meld of attributes constituted by the two separate beings.  This notion of endless splitting, endless scale shifts, endless divisions, or dissections, is part of the blackout machine, a way to become more, to understand more, to connect more, and if Borges was right, the thing he feared most was procreation and mirrors, because they both brought more people into the world.  In the exhibition, Caivano brings in more elements and creations from nature that mimics people. It’s nature’s longing to understand the human relationship, of union and separation, of consciousness, of communication, of understanding, or relating.  In our present world more and more understanding is mediated by corporation bodies, which are like virtual fields, little specifics, and more of replication of desires for a consumer.  Not of and for the people, but just for capitalist gains, the fiduciary what we hold valuable.  A representing body standing in for another absent body, which only exists, based on the value we assign it.  These are some of the thoughts that have gone into the work.  Big scary totalitarian monolithic looking natural forms, to bodies made from branches like nervous systems, to schemes of detailed specimens, to stealth references, to rising bodies over the land with nothing really there but made up of the debris, all trying desperately to understand one another, or it’s separation, it’s blackout machine, death, the abandonment of the body, it’s resurrection, it’s transcendence, or loss of self and relation to the physical, a transition into another order, and state of being which is informed by the romantic past and the marriage of the utopian future of technology and replication, like the perfect symmetry of the ornamentation of the dress. 

When Don Quixote attacked the windmills, he saw giants instead, he could only see that which fit his cosmology of logic and heroics, his time of chivalry, his fantasy of the giant evils, but they really were just windmills a form of technology in the past context.  So, what are our current windmills, what is the technology we only see from the mythology we’ve created.  In the show I wanted to use this notion as a metaphor for how the transformation of the princess to the future spaceship is a shift in thinking, in perception, a princess is not going to see spaceships, she is going to see knights, and a spaceship can only see other worlds and space, so by shifting the context we may see that 500 years is not a long time to connect the two entities.  And so time is really irrelevant as an idea for narrative on this show.  There is no story, but interrelationships of scale and thought, of elements, and structures, both poetic and scientific.  It’s a marriage of two opposing structures, like the Man and Woman protagonist in the story.  The show presents the way one of these bodies’ functions in not such a literal way . . . 

Bruce W. Ferguson

February 2, 2006