Exhibition Gallery Van Riel - Buenos Aires - Argentina

“....a few levels and nuances, delicate transparencies… and a twig or a root, that also gets inside the frame. A twig that branches from left to right, from right to left…the radical issue in Cavadas is also the asceticism, those soft changes that alter the image, while jumping from one work to the next one. There is no outward interest in a “first sight” conquer. But there is the underlying aim of forcing the most personal temporality….”

Miguel Lebenblick - (art critic) Pagina12- October 16th 1990-

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"...his exhibition could be named "Variations on a Theme". And this musical denomination would not be arbitrary, because Cavadas' work has deep similarity with those intimate topics that are developed so often in chamber music..."

"...the argument is a branch fragments and a cloud that appear in different areas of the painting, in an hermetic dialogue, hardly a whisper in the silent surface..."

"..but these scarce signs of nature do not spread themselves in a naturalistic space; they always appear among the repeated orthogonal modules that make then of the place, a symbolic or emblematic space..."

"...once the first look has traversed the work, we begin to perceive other eloquences: the transparencies and fogs of matter, the imperceptible rhythms and expressions that populate each fragment in which expression struggles to appear, and finally makes present for us, an enigmatic feeling of the world..."

"...It happens that Cavadas' works are meditated signs of a subjectivity that finds at each step, the tension that point out for us, - what is still farther on: the place where the invisible and the emptiness start talking…"

Raúl Santana - Agosto 1990

 

Museo de Arte Moderno - Buenos Aires - Argentina

"... when around the middle of last year I began to see the sculptures that Cavadas brought to Buenos Aires every once in a while from Bariloche (where he lives), I did not hesitate to invite him to make an exhibition in the Museum. Again his singular temporality, again his evanescence: again his exercise in watching the value of the minimal modulations in matter…. no matter if it is pigment or Patagonian cypress. This allows me to state that beyond the nature of his works, above all Cavadas dons us with sensitive testimonies"

"...the sculptures that he presents today are the result again of a tuned dialogue: the artist interrogating with careful attention what underlies, hides, or inhabits the wood. Significant forms advance towards us, attracting or rejecting the environment. Tensions between matter and the representation of human, in an interplay where neither the abstract nor the figurative prevail".

".. It happens then, that this silent sculptural adventure also involves the designer and the painter in Cavadas".

"And if art has been many times the mediation between nature and culture that has ultimately erased and eroded the features of the first, in the works of Juan Cavadas it is a respectful mediation that makes its own signs, but saves to the utmost the natural matter without ever silencing the identical, and persistent, whisper of the cypres".

Raúl Santana - July 1994 - Critic, and poet, he was Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Advisory of the Chancellery, and current adviser of the Cultural Center Recoleta, in Buenos Aires. 

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Sensitive Testimonies

“Sensitive Testimonies” is the name Raul Santana, Director of the Museum, has given to the group of works (sculpture and watercolors) that Juan Cavadas is now exhibiting in the main room of the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Buenos Aires. Even if the word “sensitive” already defines a clue to get nearer Cavadas’ art, I would also add that it constitutes a lyrical sensitivity… In my opinion, here we find the stress on  subjectivity, that vision of exterior reality that is drenched by a high dose of interiority, of feeling, and or meditation.

This position before the outer world is the same as that other lyrical poet: Fray Luis de Leon. And it is certainly not a coincidence that Cavadas has dedicated one of his last series of watercolors and collages to Federico Gorbea, the great Argentine lyrical poet who lives in Spain, and who also walks “a hidden path”. And to reaffirm what I am saying, let us remember that Cavadas himself has been living in San Carlos de Bariloche for the last 10 years, and that his few visits to our megalopolis have not succeeded in perturbing the communion, that dialog, that the artist keeps with nature. This dialog is most evident in his sculpture; he has impressed on his wood, on his trunks, the insubstantial touch of dreams. This achievement is the result of an intimate dialog between the artist and the material. A dialog that has a strange fragility, risking dissolution in front of an observation too frivolous or too clumsy.

The woods, very well illuminated and situated cleverly, are well defined in space, not only in their boundaries but also their palpitation in the grooves that the artist impressed on them in search of light and shadows… I always admire extreme respect for the materials, in art.  And particularly in the case of Cavadas, this respect is related to a high level of subtlety that I dare here to call “magical”. In this way, in a work like “Torso” from 1993, it is as if the wood had merely been touched in passing by the thought of the artist, as if it had only received an insinuation from him. So huge is still the presence of the trunk caressed by the scented winds of Patagonia, that purest air that makes our visual perception still purer.

The watercolors are a separate matter. And they deserve to be considered separately. They exhibit the same sensitivity, and the “collages” remind us of the years that Cavadas spent in Guillermo Roux’s company.  Not because of a similar aesthetic, but because the formal wisdom displayed in them cannot be invented.  They are eloquent whispers that come like clarinets from the spiritual world. If less is more, as Van der Rohe once said, we will find here monumental works that come out of a few brushstrokes and colors. To end: an exceptional exhibition that no art lover should risk not enjoying.

Rafael Squirru - La Nación September 17th 1994. - Rafael Squirru is a poet and an art critic. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Buenos Aires. Director of  Cultural Relations of the Chancellery. Director of  Cultural Relations in the OEA. He has published more than 50 books. He has given numberless conferences and courses in Argentina and Europe.