Pierre Cavalan – Boundless Plains to Share

Like a double agent performing a discrete act of espionage or trompe-l’oeil, Pierre Cavalan accesses an imaginary portal of his own creating between jewellery and sculpture. This vacillation between scale and media reflects the sensation of viewing life through an inverted spyglass and begs the question “Is this jewellery or is it sculpture?” Thankfully the artist does not supply the answer but allows this ambiguity to slip through another imaginary portal of categorisation.

Finding his medium in the mid 1970’s within the rigorous confines of traditional jewellery, Pierre Cavalan began to explore narrative within his medium. By insinuating found objects, badges and cutlery into his forms he managed to create subtly aesthetic wearable political statements. These works defined his output in the mid 1990’s and the Fin de Siecle Chronicle became a highly collectable series of bespoke jewellery that is now dispersed between important collections in the USA from the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) New York, the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas to the National Gallery of Australia.

Cavalan’s use of found objects finds a unity within the fusion of precious and recycled metals. This amalgam of valuable and seemingly worthless objects transform, by a sleight of hand on the jeweller’s workbench, into wry socio-political commentary. The endless quest for recyclable material must surely have led the furtive imagination of Pierre Cavalan to what transpired into the inevitable hurdle: scale. Scale, the enduring obstacle has, in his current exhibition at the Frances Keevil Gallery, seemingly been overcome. By reducing the content to an intense host of expressions there remains one narrative – homogeny.

Subscribing to Mother Theresa’s philosophy …We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there the ocean would be missing something. It is here that, as individuals, we find our voice in a ubiquitous sea of faces and the fictitious and seemingly harmless anonymities who appear in these works have a vocal potency to whom Cavalan provides the voice that lights the fuse to our sensibilities, pricking our consciences, reminding us of the other crowds, the crowds that wash onto our coastlines, the crowds that flee the oppression of their homelands, the mass migration that happens in periodic waves throughout our history.In this respect, Pierre Cavalan channels the message to the world of Sabastiao Salgado and in a dramatic reaction to a universe in turmoil, the familiar host of faces that populated previous works begins to disappear and the lyricism in which Pierre Cavalan sought refuge is replaced by a chilling geometric formality. This arrangement of structural and compositional elements comes to a climax in “Masters of War”, a tour de force that proves to be a work of uncharacteristic brutality.

When all portals in the evolution of Pierre Cavalan’s work seem to have been unlatched, there is yet another expansion that hails a further shift into sculpture. It is as if all boundaries have been forsaken and, with his recent inclusion in Sculpture by the Sea, his work has evolved from the forefinger to the foreshore in forty years.

Nick Vickers.

Frances Keevil Gallery
1 to 21 September, 2014
Sydney