CROWN JEWELS SUITE Painting

"In the current atmosphere, with diluted genres absorbed by the seemingly endless shadow of Duchamp and rife with the objects and power of media and new technology, to be able to breathe in the old tradition of painting is at the very least an act of rebellion. It is also a tribute to the democracy of the classic; in other words, a tribute to those things that last through time and bring us pleasure. Calvino’s paintings should be analyzed in this context. In an apparent evocation of the now distant graffiti of Basquiat, his narrative pays tribute to a hermeneutics that is decipherable through the references he admires: refining on Dubuffet and the most recent heritage of the post-formalist abstraction that reacted to Greenberg’s Formalism. His paintings reveal evidence of past experiences that define subtle text and light iconography within thick brushstrokes of warm colour as well as vacuous emulsive areas that must be interpreted emotionally. Combining recognizable techniques Calvino nevertheless tries to define his pictorial space – as a hidden secretion of life or an event that is reflected despite ourselves – like a musical score, sequencing the rhythmic value of the composition when confronting the randomness of his iconography with the vast chromatic field and the light that emanates from it." Xosé Antón Castro Historian, Art Critic and Art Curator -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "En una atmósfera artística, como la actual, diluida en sus géneros, absorbida por la cuasi infinita sombra de Duchamp, los objetos y el poder de los media o las nuevas tecnologías, respirar la vieja tradición de la pintura resulta, cuando menos, un acto de rebeldía, pero también un homenaje a la democracia de lo clásico, es decir, a aquello que, a pesar de todo, permanece en el tiempo y nos produce placer. Y en ese contexto debemos analizar la pintura de Calvino, un relato que, en la aparente evocación del ya lejano graffiti de Basquiat, rinde culto a una hermenéutica descifrable en la admiración de sus referencias: refinando a Dubuffet y la más reciente herencia de la abstracción postformalista que reaccionó frente al formalismo de Greenberg, podemos intuirla como huella de acontecimientos, huella que definen la sutileza del texto o la levedad de las iconografías en la densidad gestual del color cálido tanto como los vacíos del territorio emulsivo que nos toca interpretar emocionalmente.