Games for a Blackout Machine, Guild & Greyshkul, 2006

Beginning March 11, 2006, Guild & Greyshkul will present Ernesto Caivano’s “Games for a Blackout Machine”, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Working from an individualized cosmology envisioned many years earlier and realized recently through drawings, sculpture and now prints, Ernesto Caivano will present “Games for a Blackout Machine,” a new chapter of his oeuvre “After The Woods”.

 “After The Woods” is the story of a knight and a princess caught in a boy meets girl, girl and boy are separated, and girl and boy try to reunite traditional plot trajectory. However, in Caivano’s 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 is in the process of evolving 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.

Cryptic, enigmatic and organic, like the information they reference, the drawings are profuse with both futuristic and historical references. Recent advancements in communication along with stealth and military design strategies have had an effect on this new chapter. Large monolithic areas of black ink in several works appear like armor or seismographic readings of a catastrophic event. Simultaneously the minute world of nano technology leads the Blackout Machine beyond the corporeal world of woods and bodies and into a microscopic view of the princess’s separation from the knight and her transformation as it occurs on a cellular level.  In a series of diptychs, entitled Spectral Divisions (Armor), the splitting, separating, and re- forming of genetic information during mitoses is suggested through the symmetrical arrangement of thin rainbow colored “Spectrum Codes” that fade from blue to red as they pass across the two drawings. In another drawing entitled Arbor Axis, dark vein like branches like veins harness multicolored leaves to form the princess’s silhouette and body. “Evolutionary Sequencing Codes,” or “Symmetrical Growth Elements,” the building blocks of alchemical growth, float throughout the drawings amongst the debris that is scattered across their surfaces causing the scale of the work to constantly shift and feel at once infinitesimally small and expansively larger than life.

Overall, the drawings suggest the inability to assimilate in any concrete gesture, all of the elements that compose a whole. A cinema of Don Quixotian proportions – grand gestures of illusions – dystopian plans, and misguided heroics, “Games for a Blackout Machine” questions the process associated with the abandonment of the body, a fadeout, concealment, denial of information, loss of self, a transition into another order, a state of being. The activity of transformation is the metaphor for a genetic reunion of the princess and the knight. From a baroque tradition of forms, reference, and pathos, which morphs to a present state of technological design, the drawings depict key steps in the trajectory of this narrative, along with the invented microcosm that supports, at an assumed cellular level, the agent of this transformation, inevitably leading to the marriage and conception of opposites as equals - as one - as a Blackout Machine.