Ernesto Caivano

Ernesto Caivano was born 1972 in Madrid, Spain. He currently lives and works in New York. Caivano has studied at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and Columbia University in New York.

Caivano’s meticulously detailed ink drawings depict an ambitious narrative based on lovers’ courtship, separation, retribution and eventual evolution. Varying in format and scale from scroll-like panoramas to small detailed studies, Caivano’s drawing portray a timeless tale of Polygon and Versus, who were torn apart upon the consummation of their union and transported into the woods, signifying an alternate reality and universe. Through time, Versus, clad in knight’s armour grows congruent with his natural habitat while Polygon’s evolution transforms her from Renaissance princess into a spaceship representing the advancement of technological intelligence.

Using the narrative in tandem with drawing, as a story-generative tool, Caivano resists any chronological reading by switching between staged episodes of the lovers’ desperate struggle to communicate and find each other (aided by birds called the Philapores) to more specific features such as the coded communication between the lovers, atmospheric debris and extinct species of flora that inhabit the woods. Together these provide a versatile compendium of Caivano’s unique Edenic world, rich in stylistic influences both archaic and contemporary; Renaissance literature, archaeology, geology, medieval art, Flemish Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, Japanese prints and screens through to more Modernist strands of abstraction and minimalism. Accumulating an expansive realm of sources and anomalies from nanotechnology, molecular physics to cosmology and mysticism, Caivano masters his own parallel universe and self-contained evolution.

Solo exhibitions include Pioneer Works, New York (2013); White Cube, London (2008); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2004). He has participated in many major group exhibitions including at the Guggenheim, New York (2015); The Royal Academy of the Arts, London (2010); White Cube, London (2010); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2007); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2005); and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2004).