Vitamin D
New Perspective in Drawing
New York-based artist ERNESTO CAIVANO is currently in the process of telling an ongoing epic story. His recent drawings are visualization of excerpts from After the Woods, a fantastical tale written by the artist that involves a man and woman, separated for millennium, who attempt to reunite an an unspecified post-apocalyptic future. During their time apart, he has become a knight with the power to aid the evolutionary development of plants and she a spaceship who symbolizes (and fosters advances in) technology. Caivano's protagonists consistently encounter exotic creatures throughout their journey, and even transmit messages written on the wings of birds the artist call “Philapores,” who, incapable of normal flight, travel through dust, water, and other matter. Allusions to art history (the prints and drawings of Albrecht Dürer, the Romantic visions of William Blake, and early Modern explorations of abstraction), fractal geometry, contemporary telecommunications technology, advanced scientific inquiry and the fables and fairy tales of medieval literature round out his bustling cosmology.
The drawings, which vary from notebook-sized individual sheets to scroll-like works that are over seven feet wide and two feet tall, are impressive feats of concentration and discipline: Each is a hyper-detailed accumulation of short, micro-thin lines rendered in black ink. Caivano's meticulous, near-uniform blackness occasionally takes silhouette form, as in works like In Shadows With Knight (2003), or in passages that invert black and white, as in Traps, Screens, and Offerings (2004). Occasional flashes of brilliant color rendered in gouache and watercolor, usually a connective tissue between multiple larger elements in the work, irradiate his vignettes.
Caivano intersperses representational vignettes with smaller, more abstract details. After the Woods is a linear story presented out of narrative order—the artist likens his process to a filmmaker who shoots scenes based on practicality then rearranges them in the editing room; another critic likens Caivano’s tale to Julio Cortazar's classic proto-hypertext novel Hopscotch—and Caivano readily admits he does not yet know how his own plot will end. Perhaps this is as it should be, since thinking about his lead character’s Odyssean striving plunges viewers into almost impossibly large topics. The story can be seen as a metaphor for our attempts to reconcile technological development with non-human life and the natural environment. A formal reading places the allegory's distinctive focus on bifurcation (man/woman, humans/nature, reality/fantasy) in line with the slippery divide between abstraction and representation (or legibility and obscurity). Yet another avenue of interpretation could focus on the adventure story behind the drawings and its relationship to various storytelling techniques. Although he has specific ideas about the world he has crested and the place of each detail an it, Caivano is careful not to prescribe specific readings. Instead, like his mythical knight and princess, we are left to roam, grasping for clues, through his intricate and beautiful forest landscape. —Brian Sholis
