Category Archives: Paul Cava

Portrait

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Paul Cava. Denise (Rope). 2010. Archival pigment print; 13 x 19" sheet. Edition of 15.

Paul Cava‘s photo-based collages and montages generate juxtapositions of the forbidden, the natural, the technical, and the human. The layered planes of the collages have a tendency to estrange the viewer from the photographic plane most distant from the viewer: the human, Eros, must be sought beneath writing, the natural world, and this technology (airplanes and Ferris wheels have played a large part in his collages of the past five or six years, particularly underscoring artificial and technological means of vertical transcendence). He has more recently turned to a series of photographic portraits, like most photographic portraiture presenting a more unmediated experience of the subject (and for that more erotic and in some cases disturbing, but no more provocative surely than the more sensual of his collages). More interestingly these portraits undo the collage, the layers of which mediate the experience through the manipulation of the artist. As does the photograph, of course, but like the portraits of the New Objectivity they are similarly confrontational and welcoming. Cava is no provocateur however: any provocation is a second-degree experience of his work, which first suggests interior transgression.

I have written about Paul Cava’s work on several occasions and call attention to this writing here. More from his own online portfolio here.

Desire and erotic transformation

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Paul Cava, Alisma Plantago Aquatica. 2001. Iris print on 18th century engraving mounted on paper. Unique. 19 x 25 1/4 inches.

The power of erotic desire to transform the body not only of the desirous subject but also the desired object is presented in art as early as Aeschylus and Ovid. Paul Cava‘s montage Alisma Plantago Aquatica completes the abject quality of this desirousness and subverts the gaze: the presentation of the woman (theatrical curtain drawn to the side), both anal and vaginal, is deliberate, entirely willful and open, and the montage draws into itself all nature, all the world, including the texture of the manmade objects in the montage. The sculpted marble of the staircase, the drapery that hangs between her legs, her legs themselves bound in stockings create a tactile montage that everchanges as the eye is drawn over the work. Along with the abject quality of the presentation is the duality of the conscious and unconscious status of the woman, the plant bonded with the animal and the human, as the past is bound with the present. The eye recoils with the recognition of the life that flows among and through the conjoined veins of animal, human and plant, coursing through both conscious and unconscious. What the woman welcomes is the penetration and interpenetration of object and subject, material and time itself. She is Daphne, pleasure unbound, if still and trapped in her status as nature. There is both terror and pleasure for the spectator in the offered opportunity for penetration: what will become of yet another jointure, of man with woman, what other transformations may, as if by magic, turn into a shared substance of ecstatic experience?

And drama and theatre? Of course drama and theatre: for the subjects speak — even if they whisper, the words and sounds of the women susurrate, for it is always possible that the woman in Cava’s montage speaks, and she may say … the words the erotic dramatist hears through them.

Paul Cava’s Heart of the Matter will appear on the cover of my book Word Made Flesh, due to be published next month by EyeCorner Press.

A word from the photographer

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Paul Cava, Heart of the Matter (2005). Antique letter, wax seal and pigment print. 15 7/8" x 10".

Paul Cava, whose Heart of the Matter above will appear on the cover of my first book Word Made Flesh (now scheduled for March 2011), is similar to the artists and dramatists of the “New Expressionism” in that his work traverses technique, time and media to explore Eros and the pain of loss. Late last year his solo show at the University of the Arts covered three decades of his work; though Paul is often reticent when it comes to speaking about his art, he sat down for a brief interview with curator Sid Sachs as part of the exhibition and discussed this aspect of his work:

Sachs: Each part of your process evokes the past.  So here you are in the twenty-first century.  How do you fit into your time?  Do you feel somehow part of an anomalous parallel world?

Cava: I understand the gist of your question but I feel you are stacking the deck a bit. For example, in the ink series I paint over other contemporary subjects besides old master paintings. There are the images of the victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Model and Man/Woman series, hardly romantic or nostalgic. In any case, I will cede your example for the sake of the larger point that you are making. I may use elements of the old in my work, but seek in relation to other pictorial elements a timelessness and most importantly an intimacy through metaphor. That is what I feel gives the work relevance and engages it in the here and now. I go for an unnerving sensual experience, not for a nostalgic comfort zone. My concept of time is inclusive of the past but with a pulse. I often ground my work in natural forms because they are outside of specific cultures and universal. Upon this ground I try to portray the humanist condition of being alive in a world where fear, love, anxiety, desire, and loss cross- fertilize. It’s a sexy, messy business but someone has to do it, right?

Paul talks about his work more in a series of interviews here, and an online gallery of his photographs can be found here.

Upcoming: Paul Cava

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Paul Cava's Nemaleon #2 (2005), archival pigment print, 16-1/2" x 13-1/2"

Paul Cava’s 30 Years, a retrospective of this remarkable photographer’s work, will open at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery on 14 October and run through 29 November. Paul’s work is a breathtaking examination of the tactile qualities of flesh and nature, a brilliantly sensual rendering of the ephemeral qualities of eros and the world. More information about the exhibition is here; I wrote about another of his works, Listrum Vulgare, here.

One of Paul’s photos will grace the cover of Word Made Flesh, my book due from EyeCorner Press in January 2011. But don’t miss this chance to see a career-long retrospective of this astonishingly sensitive and sensual American photographer.

De causis plantarum

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Pressed between the pages of a yellowed book, its thick red leather cover oxidising with age, or a palimpsest under glass: our vision overlaid upon a translucent writing, etched upon flesh, flesh upon flesh between wooden bedposts (antiqued, whether present or past), and all laid atop the seeds contained in berries hanging from the pulsing vine. An openness, her body a blossom, rooted upon his. A finger reached to touch, to disturb, and the page crumbles: sere and flaked, ink, flesh and leaf easy fuel for a wooden match. The intent of the disturbance to participate, but the couple is beyond us, too fragile for our participation. Their pleasure operates from within the veined green, behind the unreadable text, the foolscap of their history and inscription of their coupling. Legs intertwined to weave and thread through the crumbling textures of history, drawing them all to their root, his deep penetration into her, both arched in criminal desire. (See her limbs, fetished in a caressing silk.) She settles on him, full body surrendered, his body a bed for her that surrounds, into which she sinks, as the layers settle upon a tender page, inside a tender book. Under a glass that protects them, from us.

This could remain in light, as torn as a Schwitters collage, but Schwitters you could drive a truck into, you could laugh at the tickets and the numbers, the only travel here is towards the center, the self, not detritus of railroads, instead things themselves. These handwritten words, besides, not torn but fading: ink disappearing in light; dancing letters and figures in retreat from present torture.

In anger and envy the spectator, businessman, politician, puritan and moralist, shatters the glass that protects them, holds them safe in the confines of the curling leaf, the arms that embrace her. If you were to set a match to the sere linen page, this architecture of the dry surface, it would burn quickly, explode, set them free, in eternal memory of each other.

Image: Paul Cava, Listrum Vulgare. Used by permission of the artist.