GIUSEPPE CACCAVALE

Born in 1960, in Afragola Naples, Italy. Lives and works between Bari and Paris.

Armenia, Ossip Mandelstam: Dessins, 2016

In 2014, more than twenty years after finding in a Naples bookshop a copy of Viaggio in Armenia by Ossip Mandel'stam, Caccavale endeavored to type in graphite powder the Italian and English version of the verses written by the poet, on the occasion of his trip to Armenia in 1930-31. Caccavale has produced 5 large albums (format 30 x 43 cm), taking the typographies of the complete texts of the poems at the lead mine, each containing twenty-five double pages which are a visual translation of the literary work.

Armenia IV, 2017

The apricot tree in Armenia turns into a duduk, through which man's breath sends sounds to mountain ranges. The poem "Armenia IV" by Ossip Mandel'stam, through the hands of man, digging into the stone wall in Gyumri sends words to the eye by offering it to his eyes.

This is Giuseppe Caccavale’s Mount Analogue. From nature to nature.

The work of Giuseppe Caccavale oscillates in time and space. The monumentality of its material, extending over walls, and the fragility of its colours encompass the spectator in an oneiric and spectacular world. Focusing on the ancestral technique of the fresco, Caccavale inscribes himself as an interpreter who gives the floor to the spaces surrounding our existence, on the walls where the "grammar of nature and the sacred" is enclosed, seeking contact between word and figure, poetry and gesture.

Caccavale has taught mural art and drawing at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and completed several studies at Mount Athos with Unesco, as well as stays in Flanders to study Flemish primitives and polyphonic singing. He represented Italy at the 56th Venice Biennale, where his building site was an opportunity to combine design, mural art, poetry and photography, in presenting a poem by Massimo Gezzi.

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Among his recent shows in 2016: Viale dei Canti, Opera built with composer Stefano Gervasoni, Italian Institute of Culture in Paris, France; Hours and  days,  Macro Museum Rome, Italy; A glass house, CIRVA-Cantini Museum, Marseille, France.

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