Giuseppe Cavalli

Giuseppe Cavalli
The Truth of Light
Anne Biroleau e
Jean-Claude Lemagny
Immanuel Kant tells us that there must have been a day when a geometrician, perhaps Thales, understood that
what mattered was not this particular triangle drawn with chalk or in the sand but the pure idea of the triangle that
he had in his mind. Symmetrically but conversely, what should interest us in a work of art, regarded as such, is not
the ideas that it suggests but the pure presence of its material forms.
This simple truth lies at the root of Giuseppe Cavalli’s works. The entire development of thinking about art over
the centuries strives to release it from the parasitic thoughts of a moral, anecdotal, psychological or sociological
nature that encumber and distort it. This became still clearer at the beginning of the twentieth century with the
advent of abstract art, which expresses directly – in the works and without too many detours into theory – the possibility
of an art that holds together as art. It is remarkable that the recent art of photography managed to take this
approach as quickly as painting back in the 1910s with Alvin Langdon Coburn. The particular relationship that photography
maintains with a nameable and recognizable world made it impossible, however, for its development to be
confined entirely to abstract experiments. The path of photography has proved to lead through the meeting between
purified forms as seen for themselves and the poetic realities that, as we have known since Alfred Stieglitz’s
Equivalents, the photograph is eminently capable of conveying.
It is here, at this point of confluence, that Giuseppe Cavalli’s work is precisely situated. From the very first glance,
the word that comes to mind is purity: the limpid thought of forms disencumbered of any extraneous consideration,
distinct and rigorous thought that marshals the beings and the things photographed in accordance with an order that
clearly organizes space. Giuseppe Cavalli is one of the great masters of space. We would know nothing of the existence
of space but for the links manifesting it, and Cavalli handles these links with masterful economy. In choosing
and arranging them, he addresses first and foremost the expanse that separates them and that gives itself to us in all
its breadth. A vacuum of objects, a void that sings with all its poetic presence in the same way as silence sings in the
hands of a great musician.
But here photography also reminds us of one its inescapable characteristics, namely the fact that its space is
inhabited. Even if there is nothing represented, there is the texture of its silver grains. It thus differs ultimately from
an art to which it is closely akin and with which it shares numerous effects, namely the art of engraving. No matter
how subdued it may be, the vibration of engravings is always in the final analysis generated by the clash of blacks
and whites.
These are marks that encroach, however finely, upon the immaculate blankness of the paper. The true domain
of photography is grey, a grey of a granular texture that vibrates with the intimate variations of its grain, the nuances
of expanses of sand. Cavalli focuses on a range of greys so soft and luminous that grey seems to have never expressed
its whole range of subtle shades before him. While the light of a drawing or an engraving comes from the ground
of the white paper showing through the lines of the motif, the light of a photograph comes from outside. In a deep
sense, this is one of the causes of the effect of reality conveyed by photography, a medium endowed in so many other
respects with little realism. There is a lyricism of overall light in Giuseppe Cavalli’s work. It causes all the space to
vibrate and finely draws the sharpness of the clear, distinct lines that lend it rhythm but leave intact the mystery of
its pure, serene expanse. Giuseppe Cavalli’s work magnifies the happiness of a world revealing itself in the sun, in
the unique light of Italy.
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