Introduction
eterotopie
by Pierluigi Ercole
Paolo Cavinato’s aesthetic research can be defined as a phenomenology of space: his works of art actually move upon the verge of a heterogeneity that simultaneously unites and divides interior and exterior space.
The settings created or reproduced through video-images and photographs acquire the features of a heterotopy, that is to say, a physical place that is connected to all other spaces so as to break up or reverse their relation. As a result, his empty rooms in livid and dim colours or his optical boxes seem to create an illusory space capable of depicting the whole real space – all the areas where human life is divided into compartments – as much more deceptive. Upon viewing these living works of art, the visitor experiences a sort of break with his traditional time; the images express a powerful metaphysical dimension as suggested by the minimalism of the scene. Through the various techniques he adopts, Paolo Cavinato develops synaesthetic spaces saturated with desires, moods and sounds – places where real images, mental pictures and emotive projections meet. However, his poetry of space is not intended to convey a sensation of protected intimacy. His model of home, where each element is transformed under the quiet but constant influence of water drops, evokes dreamlike visions, in which the complex geometry and the absolute transparency concur in the creation of a hazardous place. Although no rejecting intimacy exists since all intimate spaces are designated by attraction, in the rooms and settings that he represents, such positiveness turns into a series of objects and thoughts going adrift within a restricted space. Through the dialectical opposition between inside and outside, Cavinato founds his own research on the physical-emotional experience as well as on the absorption of phenomena that may emerge either from real or from imaginary places, thus restating their highly problematic nature. In his representations ranging from absolutely bare rooms of Kafkian memory to doors that disclose scary shadows and to mirrors as a Lacanian symbol of the creation of our own subjectivity and identity, everything participates in the building of these non-places predominantly marked by ahistoricality. The lack of elements denoting a cultural or sociological profile shows that, in the face of all this suffering – or more drastically, before death – there is nothing but a Man deprived of any illusory mask.
Paolo Cavinato’s research develops from a reflection on the “situatedness” of the aesthetic gesture as well as from the consciousness that such gesture is simultaneously “situating”. In other terms, he creates or discloses icons of unconscious places captured from our own imaginary world in a nearly dreamlike manner – a kind of investigation on the primordial elements of his own artistic view.