Tony Cavalline
I Was Once, Too
Mixed Media on Panel
24" X 18" X 1 1/2"
2018
The artwork in Cavalline's exhibition, A Map & A Key, offers a fragmented landscape of lost adventure and faint longing, pieced together from boyish ideas of an arcane and extraordinary world, softened and worn by years of misremembering. Using a rich combination of expressive mark-making, textural painting, and idiosyncratic collage, his compositions seek to capture memory as a moving cascade of fiction and recollection. Embedded with insignia that hint at the esoteric symbols of a forgotten culture, Tony Cavalline: A Map & A Key recalls a sensitive boy’s pure and desperate creation of mythology and speaks to a quiet and insistent longing for magic amid the devastating loss that comes with growing up.