Drawn from three recent series, the still-life images in STILL: Paul Cava Photographs and Wood Works are anything but “still.” 

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Cava’s minimalist arrangements of highly detailed autumn leaves suggest figures, bodies, and lovers as the forms interact and embrace each other, or dance gracefully in a choreography of texture, color, and gestures. Antique kimono silks serve as backdrops, bringing intimate human touch to each composition.

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His never-before exhibited wood works present texture and pattern as pure form, with subtle symbolic references and inherent contradiction suggesting deeper interpretive possibilities. Containing elements of harmony, balance, and isolation; peace, spirituality, and violence; these sculptures are both natural yet constructed, organic yet painted, restrained in form yet complex in ideas. 

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The interiors, produced during the isolation of the pandemic years border on pure abstraction, with agitated shadows, unexpected object pairings, and dashes of color in otherwise monochrome compositions invigorating even the most peaceful of subjects. While Cava’s still-lifes might not be still, they are most certainly brimming with life. 

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Brooklyn-born artist Paul Cava began his career as an artist in the late 1960s with his first explorations as a poet, multi-media artist, filmmaker, photographer, and painter. Over the last three decades he has been focused on a hybrid form of expression that synthesizes his early work by combining photographs, words, collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking into his own visual language, his personal visual poetry.

Cava has exhibited paintings, drawings and photo-based works in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. His work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Museum of Art; and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including Eyemazing Magazine and Das Magazin, and he has been a recipient of multiple Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. In 2005, Edition Galerie Vevais published Walt Whitman and Paul Cava / Children of Adam, a deluxe volume of Cava’s photo-based art and Walt Whitman’s poetry. The artist’s second book, Paul Cava: Photographs Collages Montages, focuses mostly on previously unpublished work created between 1979-2019.

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Cava lives and works near Philadelphia, PA.