Art, Features November 12, 2008 By Marisa Olson

ernesto3 Ernesto Caivano

     It’s a love story as focused on the relationship between a man and woman as it is with our romance with natural spaces and our love affair with modern technology. The tale has all the classic narrative formations and literary tropes of a true epic. The only two human characters are a knight and a princess who are separated in both time and space, compelled to reunite but driven by opposing forces.
     The knight has moved backwards in time, to a pre-Rennaissance moment, while the princess resides in the future. She has shape-shifted into a spaceship while he has been nearly absorbed into the earth, his body resembling plants and birds more and more every day. They are both engaged as protagonists in a story about evolution and invention. While he presages scientific research with his own botanical and zoological queries and DIY body-modifications, she bears witness to the construction of high-tech devices. Both classes of invention are, in some senses novel, and both spring from the same goals shared by the characters: those of investigation and communication. Afterall, they both want nothing more than to be in each others’ arms, even if it means time-traveling to mesh wings: one a bird’s, the other a spaceship’s. Each of the highly-detailed images Caivano has created over the years inspects and fleshes-out smaller details of the story, not necessarily taking a linear path but instead working to frame a more organic picture of the worldview created within the epic.

1 2 3 4 5