paolocavinato.net

Paolo Cavinato (1975) lives and works in Mantua

Paolo graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 2000 and completed a course in cinematography. Since 2001 he has exhibited in several solo exhibitions (Milan, London, Berlin, New York, Santa Fe), and since 1997 in as many collective shows (Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, China and USA).

In 2005 he participated in the Istanbul Biennale and in 2008, he was awarded 3rd Prize by the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan. He has also been awarded a prize by the Royal British Society of Sculptors of London, where he held a solo show in 2011. In 2014 he was in residence for six months at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai and n 2017 an important solo exhibition was dedicated to him in the Museum of Palazzo Ducale in Mantua.

In 2021 he held two important solo shows: Limen at Palazzo Te in Mantua and Another Place at The Flat - Massimo Carasi gallery in Milan with which he has been collaborating since 2010.

In the same year he had a residency program in Villa Empain, at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels.

Recently, he has been invited to partecipate in the international exhibition Sensorama. The look, the things, the deeptions. From Magritte to augmented reality, at the MAN Museum in Nuoro.

The artist’s works have been acquired and exhibited in numerous public and private spaces, including: the Artphilein Foundation in Liechtenstein, The Italian Institute of Culture in Copenhagen, the Marino Golinelli Collection in Bologna, the Barzilai-Hollander’s Collection at Brussels, the Civic Gallery in Modena, the Ducal Palace Museum in Mantua, the San Fedele Museum in Milan, the Farnesina Collection (The Ministry of Foreign Affair and International Co-operation) in Rome, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels and the Consulate General of Italy in New York.

In the last years, the artistic research of Paolo Cavinato, has developed through various disciplines and languages of art, from large installations to sculptures, from photography to graphic drawings.

He often collaborated with persons from other areas, and he spent experiences in different residences taking it as the opportunity to grow through this exchange.

Some of his works are complex constructions of visual and sound spaces. This can be small or large installations, where the audience can enter and the installations are percieved in relation to the surrounding space.

The installations are often spatial constructions, in which sculptural elements, sound and vocal performances are fused together to form a complex experience of the space.

Over the years, his research has followed different directions, but the characteristic elements regarding perspective, points of view and the exchange of glances recur as principle cornerstones. He is always attracted by the intrinsic possibilities of human beings and their gaze. Each person is unique and its thought can be distinguished from an other, in opposition to the economical or political powers that tend to uniform this gaze. This point of view can have the potential to be critical in different situations. That’s why he prefer to create a different gaze in his works. His installations often offer the possibility to be seen from several perspectives and they appear different, enigmatic, in a continuous dynamism between an inside and an outside. 

Some installations created by Cavinato, are big anamorphic spaces of perspective that study the relationship between an established and studied point of view, inside which everything is properly built and ordered, and a fleeting and precarious representation of an image seen by the outside, where the vision presents a pure chaotic and entropic space. 

The order that characterizes his projects comes from his education. The classical construction is innate, but inside it, there’s a hidden movement: "this is my way to ask myself about our origin and our future direction. On one side there’s order, mathematic knowledge, the rationality we use to build everything; on the other, there are the solitude and the doubts we carry with us. We need the rigor to clean our mind: an illusory cure to save ourselves from oblivion. Chaos is a recurrent situation. It comes from the outside or we create it, as it happens with pollution and the disruption of our natural habitat. We want to control and at the same time overcome nature. We both desire a perfect garden and a wild forest".