Corona Interiors

Paul Cava made these photographic works during a period of extreme isolation and stress reflecting the opposing ideas of stasis and change during the pandemic. Cava elevates mundane objects in remarkable and sensuous arrangements, freezing time and calling on the viewer to contemplate these metaphorical juxtapositions. Like Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, his selected characters are familiar and modest: dried fruit, animal antlers, bones, kitchen utensils, vases, and old irons. These tossed with reminders of our humanity: a cast arm and hand, a foot, a skull, a sparrow. Cava’s seemingly simplistic compositions are bathed in natural light captured at just the right time of day. Still lives set on a window sill, reverberate with a diffused radiance, as if the air itself were glowing with a corona halo. Tabletop images assembled on a kitchen counter resonate with dramatic high and low lights nearing the chiaroscuro found, for instance, in magical works of Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbaran. The difference, however, is that Cava’s photographs refuse the deepest shadowy depths that might suggest darkness or melancholy, and instead hold onto a certain playful, even jazzy joyousness. The finished photographs rise to a monumentality, creating the feeling of a mystical otherworldliness. - Hilary Jay, from the introduction.