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Maurizio Cannavacciuolo at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Ann Wilson Lloyd
The Italian artist Maurizio Cannavacciuolo's first solo museum show in the U.S., an installation titled TV Dinner, consisted of virtuosic, overlapping and somewhat faint pencil drawings rendered directly on two adjoining white walls of the small gallery reserved for special exhibitions. The other walls and baseboards were each painted in a solid primary color. Viewers first saw only the eye-popping red, yellow and blue from the gallery doorway. Upon entering and turning around, one had to adjust to the appearance of blank-looking walls. If it took a moment or two to "see" the art, it took far longer to really discern the dozens upon dozens of floor-to-ceiling outlined images that floated in an undefined space, like thoughts in a hyperactive mind.
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For each individual motif, Cannavacciuolo projects a slide from a hoard of hundreds; the projection is traced by the artist or an assistant. Some were quite large, like the fancy, prancing horse that spread across nearly half of one wall. Others were midsize and even diminutive in scale, a panoply that included insects, comic strips, postcard vignettes, script copied from one of Mrs. Gardner's notes (dateline St. Augustine, Fla.), famous architectural fragments and sites (including the museum's garden), sumo wrestlers, handguns, and female pinups and paper-doll figures from the 1950s.
Like optical illusions or visual puzzles, the larger images were hidden in the morass of lines; viewers had to back away from the wall to perceive the horse, for instance. But they needed to closely read the smaller, more complicated scenes, such as views of Havana, or a detailed rendering of a photograph from Mrs. Gardner's personal collection of the Teatro Rossini in Venice, dated Sept. 19, 1899. Cannavacciuolo has done wall drawings since 2001, and the technique is distilled from his elaborate and intensely colorful paintings, which also feature packed assemblages of seemingly random, superimposed images and patterns (some of which made an appearance in TV Dinner). Wallpaper and decorative tiles seem to be among the key inspirations.
The announcement for the exhibition carried a reproduction of the pen-on-paper drawing called Everlasting Love (2000). Against a floral trellis pattern is one of Cannavacciuolo's stranger visuals: the skeletons of conjoined twin infants, their rib cages fused and their skulls locked into an eternal kiss. This juxtaposition, the grotesque and the banal, sums up Cannavacciuolo's fever-dream esthetic. His TV Dinner was a feast of curiosities enmeshed with the everyday, a meal that leaves one feeling slightly queasy, even overstuffed, but eager for more.
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