A site-specific project for the Mantua-born artist, born in 1975, whose work creates perspectival spaces that draw the viewer’s gaze deep into them, generating effects of illusion and disquiet.
The exhibition revolves around a habitable installation entitled Attraverso, which invites visitors to move through a gallery made of mirrors and visual and perceptual effects. Here, matter is not what it appears to our eyes, within the expansion of psychophysical space. The act of crossing through it reveals gaps and openings, transformations and possibilities. Space expands, while the points of reference on which the gaze rests begin to waver within a dimension of uncertainty.
The homage to the mystery of the refractions of the sacred well of Santa Cristina conceals a reflection on time, process, and vision, but also on the relationship between body and architecture, body and space, body and void. The rational, perspectival space that frames the room is a domestic “non-place”: an inhabited room, a symbolic representation of the human condition. The organic, natural element, however, lies beyond our control; it follows its own course, its own flows, and cannot be governed by our will.
The two situations merge into an experience that brushes against our consciousness while simultaneously destabilizing it. The mirror—heir to a long artistic tradition which, over centuries of art history, from Titian to Pistoletto, has revealed reality and its double—now undermines the centrality of the human body, erasing its presence in a play of dissolvings and epiphanies.
In Attraverso, when the image vanishes, the passage reveals itself and crosses the void, as on the surface of the planet Solaris, in Lem/Tarkovsky, where a form of life external to the characters manifests itself, possessing its own consciousness and essence. It becomes itself a living being, life itself. In its presence, the viewer experiences a totalizing encounter that tests the limits of the sensible.
The exhibition is completed by a selection of earlier works, including Drops, conceived as early as 2000 and devoted to the drop as a heartbeat marking the passage of existence; as well as more recent works revolving around the site-specific installation. The Inner Spaces series, created with thin painted threads suspended across empty spaces like quantum particles, engages with the reality of our present moment. Everything seems carefully calibrated, regulated, and measured, like a habitable structure, yet nothing can hold forever: everything is transient, ephemeral, evanescent.
Within this perspectival, mental, mathematical space—a field for reasoning and a collector of the invisible energies of the cosmos—Cavinato paints light, projects it, and breaks it apart in a plunge that captures energy and premonitions.
Curated by Chiara Gatti, coordination by Rita Moro.
With the participation of Stefano Trevisi.
Special thanks to Galleria The Flat – Massimo Carasi.