‘Chopped Apple for Boo’
 and
‘After Swimming’

2020 - Painting - Francesca Cavolina
       
Francesca Cavolina is a painter living and working in London. Her works explore the effects of inherited personal rituals on our contemporary identities. Through taking inspiration from her own erratic memories, she focuses primarily on the talismanic objects that were pivotal to her upbringing and their evolving contexts in her life now. With experience in sound, sculpture and lighting, her paintings often feature in sensory installations. Cavolina's work draws upon the theories and philosophies of contemporary feminist writers, with a specific interest in how ritualism can become a pedagogical tool to navigate the female experience, challenging the discourse around trauma and the female body. Cavolina’s large-scale paintings embed ideas of ritualism, magic and familial ceremony through thin washed layering, and dream-like emblematic motifs. Cavolina is a recent Fine Art graduate from Kingston School of Art and is available to contact through instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/cesca_say/

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‘Chopped Apple for Boo’ and ‘After Swimming’

Texts by Ben Dawson


‘Chopped Apple for Boo’

Can we define our own nostalgia by appropriating our false memories? Can we conjure self through an assemblage of images? Cavolina presents us with a mind bending ritualistic response to our human struggle to find something beyond fact and fiction. We want to hold on to the tangible but we can't hold onto the soft foggy memories of our past. We remember images and objects like sand through our finger tips, and Cavolina walks us through this endeavor through her soft painted touch.


Soft, subtle and subdued could be words to articulate the scene of 'Chopped Apple For Boo', an ethereal dreaming of familiar objects that symbolise complex nuanced ideas in order to build a transient memory of something tangible, we all connect our past to our present and project in to our futures. Cavolina presents a mediation on a history of self through objects. We feel connected to these floating mystical objects, these nautical and familiar objects are in themselves emotional artifacts. By displacing them into a soft subtle space, they become spiritual and political memories of events passed.


Hidden in the opacity of the painting is a ritual, Cavolina mediates this transparency and opacity with a weight that bares the memories of said object. The stories conjured up by these assembled objects present to us a paradox that we, as the subjective viewer, can ruminate on. I cant help but be enthralled by the candle on the olive branch and the eaten apple on the spade; these slightly absurd situations depict a atmosphere that belongs within a world building of Cavolina's memories. The emotional choice of slightly absurd images floating indicates a ritualistic care in earnest: for a crutch, a large piece of rhubarb, shells, conkers and green beans. I will never understand Cavolina's memories of said images, I can only reconstruct and navigate with the tender map that she has painted out for us. Images are mental signifiers that draw from our sensory and visual memories, and the images in this painting act as apertures for my own personal experience to be embossed onto. Chopped Apple For Boo really is just an exercise in our psychological yearning for a nostalgia that once was, gestures of calm rituals and events that have happened, and leave me spell bound by this painting.

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‘After Swimming’

Ambiguity and the unknown can feel at once familiar and surreal, yet can also become comforting to us now more than ever with our lives digitized. We haven’t experienced the “real thing” for a while, and 'After Swimming' gives us the aftermath of the “real thing” - floating objects orbiting a gesture of an activity and lifestyle that once was.


Crocs filled with a pair of cheese savouries will never not have a hallucinogenic quality to it, but through the unpicking of such coded imagery, we can find a connection to something much deeper and less didactic. Fictionalizing memories through abstract objects is a deep contemplative skill that Cavolina has mastered with an airy touch of her brush, and this lightness of touch is seen through the faded, almost non-existent, background spaces she creates. The images themselves float in a mystical non-space that feels warm and fuzzy.


An empty chair manifests the identity of a ghost that once was, the speculation of who sat there lies within the woven memories are left opaque within the scene. Cavolina's painting practice intersects between our need to fictionalize our memories, and our spiritual mythological mediation on images and objects. In her work the detailing of stories are played out in paint, allowing glimpses into the dense haziness of forgetting and remembering.


Cavolina presents a softness of paint which conjures a power and care for the mundane, and transmits their agency outwards from the canvas. My respect and admiration for Cavolina's painting is embedded in their abstract, soft, mystical quality that transports me into ambiguous memories of events past, where I can look in on these tender moments an reflect back on them. I believe a painting is working when it actually alters my mind set and attitude; Francesca Cavolina's paintings seem to always leave me with a warm, melancholic, and nostalgic feeling that leaves a magical sensation in mind and body.



Read Francesca Cavolina’s article on Ben Dawson’s work HERE.

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