Ernesto Caivano has mastered the art of the understated. His sketches on canvas or paper are simple white backgrounds with thousands of fine lines etched in minute detail using ink or pencil. This is a guy with a lot of time on his hands.
His large works, taking over three panels, could quite easily be made by him having put a massive load of iron filings on the canvas and then drawing round each tiny little one of them. It looks like this too because the patterns they form are created in a way as if a magnet has been dropped at the center, splaying them outwards in a circular form. In order to take them in properly you are required to go right up to the canvas and peer at each little spec.
Japanese influences are clear in his work, although in his previous works it is more apparent as there are more figurative forms, more birds and plants and so on. In this exhibition it seems there is a reduction to bare pattern, lines and linear shapes.
Colour comes into play only in one series of works. Here six or so inky multicoloured thin lines cross the white canvas at diagonals forming triangular shapes where they meet.
There’s something really sublime about his work in a way, but the thing is with Caivano is that there is not much excitement to it all. All would look very nice in my minimalist kitchen (once I buy it) don’t get me wrong, but there is something a little bit too inoffensive about it all.
Maybe I am not getting the big picture. The description which accompanies this exhibition talks about “two tragic lovers…separated and transported into a woodland realm….Versus (the Knight) and Polygon (the Princess)”. I am, however, leaving this exhibition a skeptic.
Ernesto Caivano
Caressing Future Polygon
2008
Ink and graphite on paper
9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in. (23.8 x 16.2 cm)
© the artist
Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)
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