After the Woods: Drawings and Sculptures
By Brett Littman
Ernesto Caivano, the thirty two year old Spanish born artist now based in New York, is making waves and gaining attention for his drawings from After the Woods, 2003 – 2004, currently on display at the Whitney Biennial and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Working in a style that is based on his own personal mythology, complete with a made up world and recurring characters, Caivano is spinning a web of multilayered meaning and narrative intrigue.
Caivano is approaching After the Woods more like a film maker rather than an illustrator. Although Caivano is working from an actual story outline that describes the journey in the future through the woods of a couple who have been separated for one thousand years, each drawing is produced out of sequence as if it was “shot” on location.
The two main characters in After the Woods are imbued with special characteristics: the man, who becomes a knight, speeds the evolutionary growth of plants and the woman, who becomes a space ship, advances aviation and space technology. As well, there are birds called “philapores” who carry encrypted messages between the man and woman in an effort to help them reunite.
As the viewer participates in the creation of the narrative through the drawings the experience is more akin to reading Julio Cortazar’s masterpiece Hopscotch in the alternative chapter order that Cortazar provides in the opening colophon rather than reading the book in strict chronological order. New story lines are created by the imagination, images repeat and morph into new forms, and the thread of story is propelled but what we see and also by information that we do not know yet.
At first glance Caivano’s 7 foot scroll drawings like Nano War, Love of Philapores, Traps, Screens and Offerings; and Last Escape look like 15th Century Chinese or Japanese landscape drawings. There is an almost Asian mastery of line, detail and empty space. However, when one looks closer you begin to see forms that are based on everything from Audubon drawings of birds to low polygon count shapes most often found in video games and even Stealth bomber technology. Caivano skillfully encodes his fictitious drawn environments with folklore, science, popular culture, environmental issues, and fairy tales creating a multivalent horizon of associations and reference points. As well, Caivano symbolically hints at issues of communication and miscommunication in the modern world (referencing his own upbringing in a multi-lingual household) through the undecipherable messages that are carried on the bird’s feathers and passed between the two main characters.
However, in order to fully understand Caivano’s After the Woods project one should also take note of his small drawings and his paper cutout sculptures. In these works Caivano gives himself the room to either focus on one aspect of the story like a building form or a cloud or puncture into the real world with three dimensional cardstock sculptures of blades of grass, tree stumps or explosions. Embracing a Block of Wood, Forming Land Structures, Once upon a Time a Levitating Piece of Grass and Stealth Structures are all detailed sketches of the microcosm and ecosystem that make up the landscape in which After the Woods unfolds. Looking at these drawings one is reminded of the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten in which the viewer first sees a couple lying on the grass and is then transported (by the powers of ten) to a universe eye view of the same scene and then back to the couple on the grass. The studies of blades of grass and tree stumps are of particular relevance as they often appear in the gestalt of the drawings as integral tropes in the storyline. As discrete units the small drawings also act as tangents that might change the story line at anytime as new geometric and natural forms accumulate.
Caivano’s paper sculptures allow the viewer to experience the world of After the Woods in multiple dimensions. Caivano builds these sculptures using the low tech approach of drawing on cardstock and then cutting the forms out by hand. The individual pieces are then assembled with glue. There is certain contemplative and serene atmosphere to the sculptures which reflect the painstaking handcraft that goes into their creation. In addition the sculptures have a playful feeling like the kinds of dioramas that one makes in elementary school. One of the more interesting aspects of sculpture like The Blades of Grass, 2003 is the flat nature of the representation of the stalks. This is again referencing Caivano’s interest in video game technology and the presentation of two dimensional images in a three dimensional environment. There is a moment when one walks around the sculpture and views it from the side when the whole piece disappears from view. This optical illusion plays with the idea of filling space with the invisible or non-visible.
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In Caivano’s last exhibition at 31 Grand Inc. in 2003 he started to work with larger scale paper sculptures which look more like set designs for his fantasy landscape. The large paper tree stumps and oversized blades of grass in that exhibition truly bleed the personal mythology of After the Woods into the physical world that we inhabit.