Chiara
Bertola
In 1999
Giuseppe Caccavale held a show in the Scarpa-designed area of the Querini
Stampalia foundation in Venice. Now, at the same time as his new exhibition at
the Francesco Girondini gallery, he is once again confronting the great
Venetian architect by showing his latest work in the sculpture hall of the
Castelvecchio museum in Verona. The sculpture hall is a long, wide gallery,
which collects together a series of marble medieval figures. They have been
placed in a rhythmic sequence and are underlined and protected by Carlo
Scarpa’s acutely intelligent arrangement. Even though unconsciously, there is
more than one link between this artist and the architect: a similar kind of
attention and dedication to their work, a knowledge and use of local materials,
the simplicity of their solutions, a constant awareness of the work of
craftsmen...
The risk on
entering this hall full of sculptures is not to see the work of Giuseppe
Caccavale, which was designed purposely for the space. Along the line of
sculptures, placed slightly behind with respect to the path followed by the
public, and astutely placed between two sculptures which seem to be looking at
each other, you note the presence of an open wooden chest. The work has its
back turned on the public so as to offer to view what is usually hidden behind
and is unseen. This is Pozzo in via delle pietre, a geometrical shape
constructed by assembling together four strong grids of light wood, necessary
for bearing the layers of coloured cement that the artist has then etched with
graffiti.
This is how
artist asks the public to look in another way and to come to grips with other
things: with the work that cannot be seen but which has gone into the
construction of the sculpture. And not just this. The artist requires of us an
almost physical relationship with the sculpture, he asks us to pierce its
material body, to see all the phases of the working process, and in this way to
follow the time experienced by the work itself. He wants us to see the layers
of pointing made from the white sand of the river Adige mixed with lime, cobalt
blue pigment, and Brenta green, the green to be found in the Este area. So
right from the beginning attention must be paid to the earliest stages of the
work, which is important for understanding its value. These are qualitative
layers that lead to the final impeccable result of the work.
“... they
say that a straw-bottomed chair must be well braided both underneath and on
top”, Giuseppe said to me while we chatted beside this sculpture and, I understood,
that for his work what is not seen has the same importance as what can be
seen: “I begin from the work, otherwise
how can I makeyou see what cannot be seen?” Which is another way of saying that
the preparatory work done together with the
builder, the carpenter, and the joiner is there, is visible from all the
time spent and the energy employed, and has the same value as that of the
artist.