Chemical Vagaries: Massimo Cavuoto's hallucinations on display at PAN in Naples

Chemical Vagaries is the title of the solo exhibition of X-Max, art name of Massimo Cavuoto, held from February 7 to February 17, 2019 in the Foyer room of PAN - Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, organized in collaboration with Assessorato alla Cultura e il Turismo del Comune di Napoli and sponsored by thecharity association “Aoros” that supports the memory of the young Valerio Castiello who died prematurely in a car accident. About thirty works made in mixed media of various formats repropose, but in a completely new way, the project developed on hallucinatory images caused by a psychotic disorder from which the Neapolitan artist suffered for many years until 2012, the date of his complete recovery.

“These works,” the artist explained, “arise from my desire to share the interpretation, beyond the real, of humankind interacting with invisible energies that silently surround and shape lives, choices, chemistry, religious beliefs in interaction with the cosmos.”

Hallucinations, perceptions of parallel realities, real and imaginary worlds populated by “alien” figures have given rise to an imaginative, almost “Disney-like” interpretation of reality full of phantasmagorical figures. Atypical characters, types of earthlings, beings never seen before, are reproduced by X-Max photographically and pictorially with vector drawings. Invisible landscapes where body and mind meet in their temporal transit, visions distorted by the altered colors of nature, images of organic cells, visual memories, phenomena related to perception and brain processes will allow the visitor to enter an imagined “other” reality. From the sun to the planets, who and what surrounds us and invisibly shapes our choices, invisible, silent energies are transferred into the works by Cavuoto to show everyone the world that has crossed his existence until recently and to succeed in moving forward in creating entirely new works of art. Between the real and the dreamlike, the concrete and the fantastic, the objective and the subjective as in an eternal pictorial and photographic frame of visual suggestions, the works also physically enter the space to make it impossible to distinguish between the two dimensions: a metaphor for living through a continuous dichotomous reflection on its meaning.

Mind and body, artificial and natural meet to explore the relationship existing between art and nature, through a patient work of dismemberment of organic and non-organic forms drawn from reality and imagination until reaching the terms of their representation. Through his research he intends to make us reflect on our roots, memories, traces, feelings and emotions, with all the philosophical implications that the themes involved.Art, for the Neapolitan artist, is an existential condition, a search for the beauty that towers above us, the possibility of establishing direct contact with the works through which he attempts to return to us the feeling of a magic, a spell as a kind of introspective journey into the existential events of life rendered with images and naturalness to analyze what is in the depths of his soul and to build as a “mason of the universe,” in an abstract way, skies, hills, houses and objects, sensations that strike him and remain in his memory. Through the works in the exhibition, made with different mediums-photography, drawing, computer-the “fracture” that exists between reality and imagination is analyzed in order to be able to investigate life. A way of access to the deep structures of reality, a continuous search that landing to an image of the world is at the same time the reverberation of his own consciousness, its sensitive explication rendered with an intimate expressive urgency. Information on the website of the City of Naples.

Pictured: Massimo Cavuoto, Polaroid Drake

Chemical Vagaries: Massimo Cavuoto's hallucinations on display at PAN in Naples

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