Elle Decor ~ April 2007

An artist tells an epic love story filled with magical birds and exquisite flora. By Mark Van de Walle

Ernesto Caivano has been telling the same story for six years now. It's called "After the Woods," and it isn't taking so long because the artist is repeating himself; it's just that the narrative is very complex.

So far, Caivano's odyssey—a time-traveling fairy tale for adults about a knight who becomes a tree and a princess who transforms into a spaceship—has been recounted mainly through hundreds of drawings. Painstakingly drafted, the baroque images of endangered and extinct flowers, code-encrypted birds, and Edenic landscapes are rendered first in pencil and then ink and gouache or watercolor and range in size from a single sheet of notebook paper to 11-foot scrolls. The scenes combine the hair-fine line work of Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance-era engravings and the extravagant inventiveness of Hieronymus Bosch's scenes of hell. The narrative sprawl is vast and hermetic: You don't so much look at the work as tumble into its cosmos.

All these dizzying shifts in place and perspective may have something to do with Caivano's polyglot background. By the time he turned 15, the Spanish-born artist had lived in Washington, D.C.; San Diego: Lewisville, Ohio; and Buenos Aires (his Danish-Italian father's hometown). Then he ended up in New York at the Cooper Union before earning an M.F.A. at Columbia University. These days, Caivano--tall and lean, with a Daniel Day-Lewis-style intensity-shuttles by motorcycle between his Chinatown apartment and a new, light-filled industrial-loft studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's the first time in years, the artist says, that he's had the room to create pieces larger than 6 by 9 inches.

Small paper, perhaps, but packed with big ideas. Elements of medieval allegory appear in his works alongside Greek mythology, science fiction, and military history. Further influences can be found on the books stacked on the long desk where he works: The Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers, and Lockheed Stealth.

Even an undergrad textbook on the history of art has had an impact. "I was just amazed that you could have 500 years of history layered on top of one another." says Caivano, "and all sort of existing at the same time and same place." Mirroring this free-for-all is his anything-but-linear approach to "After the Woods." Scenes from the end of the story often are executed before those at the beginning. Or the artist will zoom in on a particular element and explore it for a few dozen drawings, as he did for an exhibition last September at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, which featured 100 exquisite botanicals. Sometimes a full plant is portrayed, while in other images, disembodied details are blown out into exotic abstractions and set afloat. off-kilter on a sea of white. That show, Caivano says, was "basically a parenthetical expression, or a footnote, to one of the sentences in the story."

Even particles of dust appear in Caivano's intricate scenarios. "Everything, no matter how small, has a place in this huge visual vocabulary and contributes to the whole." says Carter Foster, the drawings curator at the Whitney, where Caivano's work caused a stir at the museum's biennial in 2004. Alanna Heiss, director of P.S.1, is also a fan: He is, she says, "one of the only interesting young artists working with narrative." Several major institutions seem to agree: Caivano's drawings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. In 2008, his first solo museum show will be held at the Kunstverein Hannover in Germany.

The story Caivano has been telling for so long isn't even close to being finished. "I think it will take another seven years or so," the artist says. His epic is growing in scale, too. On the wall of the new studio, there's an immense canvas covered with the same flurry of tiny marks that fill many of his drawings. That's just the latest step. "By the time I'm finished, 'After the Woods' will hopefully include a variety of media, writing, drawing, sculpture, animation, painting," Caivano explains. "Maybe even film.”