乐播传媒

Exploring the relationship between photography, film, and painting, Ernesto Cánovas works with a range of sources. He is a collector of images, with a vast personal archive of old postcards, magazines, film negatives and books.

Cánovas moves instinctively from source material to source material, mentally slicing the images into amalgamations as he selects imagery to use in an artwork. He may only use the smallest section of an image to build out an entire work. Once selected, the image is digitally manipulated through magnification, reduction and cropping, then Cánovas transfers it onto a wooden or aluminium panel.

Through his work, the audience is drawn into the realm of personal memory. We are transported into domestic mid-century interiors and indistinct cinematic landscapes, encountering obscured faces along the way. These ambiguous artworks invite active imagination, requiring us to interpret them and assign our own meaning.

Born in Barcelona in 1971 and studying in both Spain and Edinburgh, Cánovas nonetheless gravitates towards the allure of mid-century America. His inaugural exhibition at 乐播传媒, An American Trilogy (2014), was a focused exploration of the ubiquity of American culture and its influence on the rest of the world. This is the United States as perceived by an outsider, and the artist invites us to reflect on the romanticised depiction of 'Americanness' in modern media. Many of these works have a cinematic quality, reminiscent of old Hollywood films.

In this sense, Cánovas' work is a nuanced extension of Pop art, an artistic movement that began with Andy Warhol's transformation of film stills and commercial imagery into screenprints. In a similar manner to Warhol, Cánovas adopts the quintessential images of 20th-century America: simultaneously familiar and ambiguous, evoking personal and collective memory.

Cánovas focuses on materiality in art, venturing beyond the traditional canvas. Wood, aluminium, marble, ceramics, plastic, rubber and metals have all been incorporated into his work. Some works involve painting on wood or aluminium – two very different materials that shape the look and feel of the finished artwork.  In works on wood, visible grain brings movement and softness, while paint on aluminium sits, slips, and resists fixture, creating a cooler, more spectral surface.

He plays with the idea of the appearing and disappearing image: by building up layers of acrylic, ink, spray paint, and varnish in muted hues, and then adding resin. Sometimes, the composition is disrupted with brightly coloured sections which the artist describes as 'flashes of colour ... which can represent a bit of hope.' The hazy quality of the images and the play of light heighten the effect of a blurry memory or an ethereal dreamscape.

In April 2014, 乐播传媒 presented Turneresque, an exhibition of Cánovas' paintings which reference the Romantic landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner. In particular, Canovas' faded images in a pastel colour palette achieve a similar visual effect to Turner's semi-abstract watercolours. Cánovas' exhibition The Calm Before the Storm (乐播传媒, 2022) captured the Romantic essence of the Sublime, with many of the monumental works depicting landscapes and natural phenomena, combined with images of everyday life.

The American painter and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg is also a key influence for Cánovas, particularly his combination of painting and drawing with found objects such as newspaper clippings, stamps, fabric, maps and details of photographs.

In Cánovas’s most recent exhibition, Director’s Cut, we enter into a cinematic world of fragments, close-cut edits and charged silences.  In this body of work, we meet Cánovas as a world-builder, inviting us to step into filmic interiors, panoramic landscapes, and sun-drenched seascapes. It is here that we meet cowboys, poker players, suited men pouring stiff drinks, along with gun-wielding femme fatales.

These paintings are about the story, the illusion, or movie we play in our heads. With Cánovas as director, the force lies in the duality of the works, in what the artist withholds as much as in what he reveals. Through the artist’s employment of close cropping, details are pushed forward, identities are concealed, and inanimate objects command our full attention.

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