PRODIGIOUS LANDSCAPES | JORGE CAVELIER

The prodigious landscapes that Cavelier paints with masterly fluidity do not take us to any specific place: rivers and forests, mountains and mangroves or seas are above all passages to enter contemplative states. Neither the large triptychs in oil and silk, nor the small watercolors of cloud forests or the murals composed of tempera of rivers and seas describe a particular place. They take us back to all the spaces traversed by humanity in time and experienced by its sister, memory. They are also geographies of hours or border zones like dawn and dusk, or like the sudden transformations of the landscape. Stroke after stroke, a celebration of water and air, earth and fire is realized, in a way that evokes the pre-Socratic search for the primordial matter of the universe, the arche, and the understanding that the visible is animated by the perception of the invisible. In The Forms of Time, the stone appears as the same timeless form erected on the rivers in the skies and in the changing waters, as a fundamental archetypal form.

In that memory of the forms that are his landscapes, the experience of perceived time is stored and potentially pulsates the idea of shaking the limits of the world. Because Cavelier does not intend to capture fleeting time in a still image, in a painting or in a finished installation, but rather to bring the viewer closer to the contemplation of his trace in the labyrinth of forms that appears while he moves among them. What we see are therefore not landscapes but a memory of the world that becomes fully aware that everything we see is the veil of an appearance.

It is perhaps Plato's myth of the cave that he paints incessantly, but instead of reflected shadows Jorge Cavelier tries to capture, through forms, the pulse of the unfathomable and, more than that, free the vision towards new understandings. Between the flow of water, a metaphor for change since the time of Heraclitus, and the solidity of stone, a metaphor for the perennial, one can trace that mystery of time open to other spiritual dimensions that it has sought since the beginning.

Adrian Herrera

Writer and Art historian