By Catherine Despont
Symbology of the Line
A few years ago I, like many people, donned a pair of 3-D glasses to watch Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I was struck not only by the vivid grace of the animals painted at Chauvet, but also by a sense of immense drama. In particular I left thinking about two concepts the movie mentioned that would have been central to the Paleolithic perspective—those of fluidity and permeability. Fluidity being the ability to shift forms under certain circumstances—man into animal, animal into man, tree into messenger etc.; and permeability being the lack of barriers between the natural and supernatural—that spirits could inhabit objects, and that men could traverse the spiritual world as well. Since then I’ve often wondered how the world would change if we encountered everything as the expression of some inscrutable element or narrative— if we read it symbolically—and in so doing I’ve often recalled the imagery of Ernesto Caivano.
Nothing is solid. Nothing is static. Nothing is whole. All is shifting, splintered, fragmented, dividing, evolving, transformed. Caivano describes a place that seems both distant and alien, and yet subtly, strikingly familiar. It is one into which remnants of this world have filtered in the form of maps, textiles, art-historical references, scientific theory and biological phenomena, even as they are voided of the familiar scale or context from which they are normally deciphered. It doesn’t suggest a foreign universe so much as a state of being—perhaps a heightened awareness—or else a spiritualized realm in which all things, past and future, exist together.
A sense of transmutation pervades the imagery. On close examination objects exist in a highly volatile state—either on the verge or in the process of metamorphosis. But even when the view is broadened the microscopic and macroscopic are constantly entwined. In the Debris series dust-like particles mimic galaxies—their intricacy simultaneously suggestive of something seen both intimately and at immense distance; the consequence of something both shattered and yet existing as a greater whole, in equal parts magnetically attracted and in the process of being dispersed.
The sense of scale is always in question. In Elements in Play the concentric grain of a tree stump recalls the circular grid of a radar screen. In Philapores Navigate the Log and Code, the feathers of two bird-like creatures curl like the beginnings of a maelstrom or wormhole. Are these birds celestial creatures capable of creating a universe? Or does their ritual symbolize something at the quantum level of our own? Are the lines in Topography of Contact the threads of fabric or the measurements of a map? Are they irreducible geometric descriptions, or are they laden with information like the colored intersections of the Chroma Transmissions.
Ostensibly, Caivano’s work recounts an epic tale in which two lovers, separated by a quest, are forced to reconnect across fluctuating time and multiplying dimensions, and yet we rarely see this story told in episodes. His hero’s quest isn’t narrated from a single point of view, and never chronologically. The protagonists appear in dismembered parts—as floating hands, or obscured faces—in darkened silhouette or engulfed by landscape, but hardly ever as knight or princess on a discernable path. We must assume they too have been affected by the rules governing the strange material state of their environment. Their progress is made not by slaying a minotaur or answering riddles from a guardian, but by acclimating—synthesizing enough information about this world to travel back to each other. In that sense their greatest obstacle is not what they encounter, but what they know. What keeps them apart is themselves.
Their quest then (poor lovers) is nothing short of understanding the mysteries of the universe—squaring the circle, turning lead into gold—which explains the scientific tonality of this tale. The means of navigation is the observation of its elements: the deciphering of its DNA, the catalogue of its phenomena, the map of its topologies. Often the revelation in these investigations is that each part seems capable of encompassing the whole. The elements of Caivano’s imagery don’t equate to the fixed meanings of a pictography. They evoke J.E. Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols—attracting “as if with magnetic lines of force, all that has ‘common rhythm’...” Thus the ‘Philapores,’ as living creatures, connect to the protagonists, connect to the natural world; having motion and (perhaps) memory they connect to information and to the motion in other phenomena—quantum particles, weather patterns, dark matter.
Caivano’s most recent work, Settlements, displays a constellation of this symbology—the horizontal arrangement of elements inviting an equal, simultaneous reading, more than the left to right sequence of a scroll. Objects rest against, stack on top up of, or hang from one another—resemblances and proximity are more telling than their diversity. Each object in itself is characterized by a quality of suggesting yet other objects—the textile that becomes a map, also alludes to the fabric of space. The trees in their cut, bent, and sprouting states alternately suggest nature and techne, human presence and its disappearance.
Having recognized this imagery from previous series we know that each component is capable of dissolving into details that suggest still further associations. Indeed the Topography series feels connected to Settlements in this way—potentially related to details of specific elements (the map, the textile), as well as the record of phenomena existing at levels that cannot be depicted at the same scale. The delicate warp and weft of these swatches suggests something right at the edge of existing—accumulations at the point of becoming material. Though pierced and pulled, the gaps in these weavings allude to something missing rather than disintegrated, like the movement of a meditative focus growing stronger at its task. If this relates to the next stage of the hero’s journey he seems more familiar with his environment—that he has integrated the symbols of his quest so far, and is on the point now of engaging them on his own terms.