乐播传媒

As legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese once said: ‘Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.’ The same principle applies to the paintings of Ernesto Cánovas. Cánovas creates paintings through cropping, cutting, colouring and layering – steadily deconstructing and recontextualising an image to suggest narrative. These paintings are about the stories, the illusions or movies that revolve in our heads as we look at them, and with Cánovas as the director, he withholds as much as he reveals. Through masterful selection, distortion and careful reconstruction, Cánovas creates a cinematic-style multiverse. By definition, a cinematic multiverse refers to a shared fictional world where elements may still act independently, but can share the same characters, settings or overarching themes and storylines. The most famous examples of these filmic universes are Star Wars and Marvel.

Contemplated as a group, the paintings invite speculation, querying relationships between people, places and objects. Across each artwork, visual tension is created through the artist’s intentional staging, as if we are witnessing the moment before or after something has happened. Does the dashboard in To the Limit belong to the car in Night Lights? What is playing and who is listening to the record player in Pure Vinyl? The artist leaves these questions unanswered, thereby allowing viewers to step into the narrative and fill in the potential storylines according to their own moods and desires.

Across Director’s Cut, we meet a roster of characters such as cowboys, poker players, suited men pouring stiff drinks, along with gun-wielding femme fatales. In Bang Bang!, for example, the viewer arrives at a moment of high tension and drama as a woman points a gun at an unknown target outside of the picture frame. Her poise lends itself to the image of Gena Rowlands in the neo-noir crime thriller Gloria (1980) by John Cassavetes, or, equally, to a double-crossing Bond Girl who has just pulled a weapon on 007.   Unlike these women on screen, we do not know who the woman in the painting is; her face is cropped out of view, a common treatment for the people in Cánovas’ paintings. We can, however, see her pursed lips, lending seriousness to the scene. The woman wears a light pastel outfit and sports a long, blonde hairstyle. Her clothes look dated, but it is hard to pinpoint from which era they belong to, adding a further layer of ambiguity to the work.  Elsewhere in works such as Find Out, we encounter another woman whose identity is edited out of the picture plane. Here, she holds a corded telephone to her ear, her mouth closed, this time suggesting she is listening. The title, Find Out, leaves the viewer with more questions than answers – who exactly is on the other side of the conversation, and what exactly is our character about to find out?

Cánovas’ paintings may be read like a fragmented screenplay, in which each work represents a different scene, character, or moment in the storyline.   In works such as Pure Vinyl and Reel to Reel, the viewer encounters two pieces of retro audio equipment.   The way Cánovas zooms in on the machinery, which occupies nearly the entire canvas, replicates the close-up shots directors use when shooting a film. In doing so, these inanimate objects command our full attention.  Just like a scene transitions from one shot to another, these close cuts offer a moment of pause across the busy narrative found in other works in the series. Equally, the way in which the objects are presented, in isolation and without any other discernible features such as time or place, lends an ambiguous quality to the works. The paintings certainly exude a Cánovas-esque style, much like the cinematic style of film director David Lynch – recognised for his exploration of Americana – defined by saturated colour and dream-logic narratives, as seen, for example, in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (1997). The paintings also possess a 21st-century Tarantino flair, echoing the director’s narrative style and iconic camera angles, such as his trademark ‘trunk shot’ as seen in Pulp Fiction (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997), and Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003).

In Director’s Cut, we witness Cánovas as a world-builder. He invites us to step into filmic interiors, panoramic landscapes and sun-drenched seascapes. In works such as Saddle Bag and Denim Cowboy, the viewer is transported to the American West. There, the landscape echoes the ruggedness of its new frontiers and takes us to the golden age of cowboy films, where Gary Cooper solidified his status as the genre’s icon in titles such as The Virginian (1929) and High Noon (1952).

Elsewhere, in Capri and Departing, we encounter a more modern and leisurely European landscape. In Departing,Cánovas depicts a man's back as he examines a coastline. He appears to be standing on a balcony, using a pair of binoculars to look at the passing boats.  In Baby Blue, we get a hint of a similar seascape in the background, further underscored by the figure of a woman wearing swimwear. The landscape here appears more intimate and less cinematic than Capri and Departing with their panoramic and, in turn, more cinematic framing. Instead, Baby Blue is reminiscent of a more personal recollection, perhaps a film from a family vacation. All three of these works reflect the quiet luxury and splendour of landscape depicted in classic European and French New Wave cinema with titles such as Contempt (Le Mépris) (1963), starring Brigitte Bardot and directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Like the frame of a film, the four corners of a Cánovas painting act like a screen or portal into another world – a cinematic universe rich with engaging characters, opulent landscapes and motifs inspired by diverse filmic genres, including Westerns, action, and film-noir. Collectively, these artworks demonstrate the artist’s refined approach to storytelling and his capacity to construct narrative through the deliberate cutting, cropping and reframing of images. Due to the ambiguous, yet universal nature of Cánovas’ imagery, the viewer can confront each work subjectively.  This is what makes Cánovas’ work so powerful and personal. Ultimately, what the viewer looks at are pools from which collective and subjective cultural memories may be both drawn and deposited.