The Daily Slice: After the Woods – Ernesto Caivano

The world is overflowing with beautiful and interesting things competing for our attention, and if you live in the real world, it’s a tall task to include appreciating the hell out of art on a daily basis. Really, who can find the time? That’s why Guy.com offers a “daily slice.” It’s a small taste of what’s going on in the world of art and design–something we find beautiful or inspiring or worthy of a peek. We’re happy to serve it up.

If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s fondness of a good yarn. Stories are passed down for generations, sometimes over the course of centuries; we read them in magazines and see them performed on television, in the theatre and on the big screen; we read novels and biographies, picture books and comics. We sing them and celebrate them.

Philapore Tug (Due Tension), 2009 4.25 x 5 Inches. Ink, marker and graphite on paper

So what place does the fictional narrative have in Fine Art? Whilst most people’s thoughts will immediately flicker to the rapturous brushstrokes of the Pre-Raphaelites or the classical painters, contemporary artist Ernesto Caivano has strikingly enigmatic methods of putting his own epic narrative on paper.

Breathing Through the Code, 2009 5 x 8.75 Inches. Ink on paper

Digits and Pores, Petals and Philapores, 2009 9.5 x 6.25 Inches. Ink and graphite on paper

It seems that all Caivano needs is some paper and ink; give him these materials and the outcome will be a delicate, complex and unmistakably alluring image, both in technique and concept. Take, for instance, Breathing Through the Code, in which we see one of the main protagonists in the artist’s ongoing story After the Woods. Her name is ‘Polygon’, and one can assume here that she is communicating with her lover-from-afar – the knight ‘Versus’ –via what Caivano has titled ‘Philapores’ (they are the birds that you see in the images).

According to Caivano, Polygon and Versus are lovers who were separated a millennia ago. His drawings depict their attempted reunification in the near future on a cosmic, geometrically ambiguous world. Versus’ powers reside in the growth and evolution of plants, Polygon’s in the capacity and possibilities of technology (she herself is epitomised as a spaceship). Their only communication relies on the Philapores. It is these facets of narrative that Caivano illustrates alongside the scope of Versus’ and Polygon’s wider universe.

Suspension of Elements (A Kind of Reassembly), 2009 18.25 x 45.25 Inches. Ink and graphite on paper

A myriad of possible interpretations lie within each image, as is the case for the narrative as a whole. Brian Sholis writes in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (2005) that “the story can be seen as a metaphor for our attempts to reconcile technological development with non-human life and the natural environment;” Joao Ribas is quoted on the White Cube gallery website as asserting that “Caivano’s narrative serves as a search for meaning lost in our own abundance of information.” Visual allusions to molecular physics and fractal geometry reside alongside more literary medieval references, forming an almost archetypal narrative that brims with what could be nostalgic and intrepid scepticism.

Elements in Play, 2009 11.5 x 7 Inches. Ink and graphite on paper

And yet despite this apparent complexity Caivano is far less ambiguous than his artwork; as to the fate of his protagonists, of the Philapores and of the beautifully sinister cosmos in After the Woods, he is deliberate about not stipulating direct connotations and meanings. Even he doesn’t know how the narrative will end; I suppose that’s the success behind any good story. We can only look on and wait to see whether or not the longing will be transformed into a reunification between the two lovers. But whilst After the Woods may resemble fairy tales in some respects, fairy tales by nature are not as delectable as one may first assume; after all, there’s nothing more boring than reading a story and seeing the words ‘happily ever after’ written at the end.