About Paul Cava
Philadelphia-based contemporary artist Paul Cava has been making work for over 30 years. Paul Cava’s artwork is in such notable collections as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Houston Museum of the Fine Arts, la Bibliotheque Nationale, and the San Diego Museum of Art.
Paul Cava’s photo-driven collages use taken, found, and repurposed images which meld with documents, prints, letters, and other small fragments to become visual poetry in the artist's hand. An easy sense of desire calls to us instinctively. Paul Cava’s content and subject work fluidly to initiate a sense of intimacy that stirs an awareness in our own private memories. We feel our heart beat, our breath fill our chest, and our skin flush.
The feelings raised by these artworks are familiar- tentative at first perhaps. For our own protection we have learned to guard our hearts with caution and attempt to suppress or evade these feelings of instinctual desire. Here we cannot. We are swept up. What we first recognized as beauty, nostalgia, memory, or dream opens before and within us, and we find we are enveloped. Our own memories lost to time or intended self-burial shake loose, feel fresh, and even throb. We experience the duality of truth. Our emotions move between fulfillment and longing, hope and regret, risk and reward... Opposites play out for Cava not in opposition, but rather, as two ends of the same thread. With dignity and grace Cava exposes the most raw, the most vulnerable beside the most delicate and joyful moments of our shared human experience.
Still Life
These photographs by Paul Cava are elegant and modern renditions of the classic still life genre. They are dramatic and quiet. As with Cava’s collages and in keeping with the tradition of still life, these photographs are metaphoric, sensual, and open. They invite emotion and evoke memory. Made in the artist’s kitchen with simple objects - glasses, vases, vessels, fruit, casts of his baby’s hands and feet, antlers collected from the yard we experience the cycle of life’s seasons.
