Paul Cava

Paul Cava - Map | Grid

Philadelphia-based visual artist Paul Cava’s work is the flesh of life- love and pain, longing and attainment. Palpable is desire, and in Cava’s works we are almost satisfied. Almost because always, we want more, back, again. It is our nature.

Paul Cava is celebrated for his collage work. Through physical and digital integrations of layers, Cava draws together images made and found. Cava has mingled his own photographs with such elements as antique paper, letters, as well as vintage photographs and prints, and works with various photo and printmaking techniques.

It is Paul Cava’s practice to use an inspiration until, as he says, “it stops speaking to me.” The dialog open, the discussion is ongoing. A visual chorus is created by use, adaptation, repetition of the same visual element or image.  The work has a life of its own. “Variations on a theme unfold as would a human relationship. It gives and takes, concedes and evolves in consideration of what has been learned in the process.” We make personal associations with the visual symbols Cava leaves open to us, so our dialog begins. Fulfillment opens. Each interaction and exploration adds a new tone, a new sentiment related, connected but never the same twice. Like human emotion itself, Paul Cava’s work is complex. It is recognizable yet always shifting.

In these selected works we find a framework the Artist has used with some repetition, the map | grid structure. Such frameworks are traditionally used to describe, contain, locate, or chart. Paul Cava represents us with images that grapple with a knowing incompleteness, a wanting unfulfilled. In Bobby and Jackie (Map) Cava prints over a vintage property map that designates parcels of land. Eden is printed over the image of a wooden chess board. Both images invite the viewer onto the slippery slope of life and art.

Paul Cava

Bobby & Jackie (Map), 1999-2017
11.5 x 11.25 in. archival pigment print
Edition of 5 | $1,200

Eden, 2003
15 x 15 in. archival pigment print
Edition of 5 | $2,500