Following a visit to our 2021 Artwave exhibtion, the writer Sue Roe generously sent us the following review.
Marco and Jacob Crivello’s joint show is a magical collection of found, constructed and reconstructed pieces of the natural world which somehow implies vastness, as we contemplate the forms of small objects in the presence of vivid works on canvas.
Recent events have brought to everyone’s attention the comparative resilience of nature - colours seem more vivid, the sky clearer, the stars brighter than before. In the Crivellos’ studios we become more alert, too, to the way the artist’s vision can pull up or distil light, render objects more tactile; reveal before our enquiring eyes the infinite mutations and changeability of the organic world.
The element of sublimity always present in the more massed, voluminous and mysterious magmas of Marco Crvivello’s earlier work is to be found in this exhibition in the tiny, forged forest scenes in tins created by Jacob Crivello, in which minuscule figures stare up from their place on the ground amidst the intricate undergrowth of Romantic realms. Here is, if you like, a kind of German Romanticism in miniature, in the forms of intricately fabricated and contained perceptions of infinite vistas. Jacob Crivello’s work is reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s surrealist boxes, but the tone is quite different; Crivello’s pieces are not curios (feés, as Cornell himself called them) but rather scaled-down perceptions of something huge – more like tiny versions of Max Ernst’s forest paintings, but here rendered so small that we, the viewers, can look down from above and share the sensation of our smallness in the face of organic vastness. Into those miniature worlds, the artist integrates tiny, modelled figures, staring out, potentially eclipsed by the worlds of tangled branches, deep woods, filtered light; but for the time being, standing firm in contemplation of the sublime. Here, natural materials evoke not only miniature glimpses of nature but also scenes of the imaginary. The exhibition as a whole expresses that idea of exploratory or tentative perception: what we find on this earth, and shoreline, is both mysterious and perpetual, has both fascination and frequency; may be collected, treasured, used, re-used, displayed from new angles; worn, weathered, worn out (almost), then still looked at again, until even wear and tear articulates their own beauty.
Marco Crivello’s new oils on panel illuminate the walls of the studios like windows of coloured, changing light. Crivello’s paintings have always been observations of geological mutation, layers of light and colour depicting the composition of the land, sea and sky, but also of the sheer, nuanced beauty of colour on canvas. In his work, the dialogue between background and foreground, earth and sky had begun to be resolved into a horizontal line which fuses colour and light, making colour behave like the sky or the sea. In the work exhibited here, the line almost becomes the subject, as the artist explores what happens to light around the line. We can stand before these paintings and watch the upper half of the canvas pull down towards the lower, as colour tips over to create a line of horizonal light, the way nature creates her horizons. The line, in these vivid works, may also feel to the viewer almost like a line of sound - the degree of distillation hints at a new element of synaesthesia - whether dissonance or harmony depending, perhaps on how long you spend watching the painting appear to split into strips of orange, blue, pink or red; the paintings are as stylish as ever but liminal, now, rather than reaching towards infinity; a thin line of sound rather than a delicate orchestration.
The works on canvas also mesh with and compliment the rooms full of found treasure on which they cast their light. Arranged on surfaces and in cabinets, found pieces of wood, metal or cloth have been flattened, or juxtaposed with other materials. The piece consisting of two blocks cantilevered by a rusty nail becomes a piece about poise and suspension, in its particular eloquence perhaps reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s pharmaceutical jar suspended on a thin string, or his upturned and mounted bicycle wheel. Individual wooden, weather-beaten doors, seen and photographed in Venice, here displayed together, take on the patina almost of flattened metal.
The Crivellos have found ingenious ways of displaying materials for exhibition as if they were leaves on a tree – rhythmically, logically; a display case or cabinet of found flotsam and jetsam creates its own intrinsic pattern. Locks are displayed in a locked cabinet; paint rags are scrunched and fitted together to make a new kind of three-dimensional fabric; paint-spattered pots are stacked to make a modest, multi-coloured sculpture. Gold leaf - or metal which here resembles gold leaf - has been pressed into blackened wood to make something that is neither metal nor wood, but a gold-blackened piece of three-dimensional, abstract beauty – one of the particularly eye-catching pieces in this show. So imaginatively has this collection been found, selected, collected and arranged in space that it almost feels as if nature has created it – we move through the studio space as into a forest or seascape, becoming the more observant as we move on through, and separate elements of flotsam, jetsam and subtle fabrication catch our attention, progressively arousing our curiosity.
Soon after seeing the Crivellos’ exhibition, early one morning we walked down to the pebble beach at Hove and found to our surprise that the sea had pulled back – the tide receded – revealing a stretch of sand at the edge, between pebbles and water, a flat expanse of pale brown against the pale blue sky striated with light, the whole picture changing both before and around us as we walked, the sky gradually darkening, the water making its way back up the beach. The stretch of sand is always there, but does not always reveal itself. The Crivellos’ exhibition is like that: the organic world revealed, in all its delicate yet robust changeability, its mutations and miasmas, its tendency to endurance; creating for the viewer new frequencies of contemplation.