Paolo Canevari is an Italian contemporary artist. He lives and works in New York City. Canevari presents highly recognizable, commonplace symbols in order to comment on such concept as religion, the urban myths of happiness or the major principles behind creation and destruction.
His works of transforming everyday materials and icons into large-scale sculptures that confront his audience with stark, political and philosophical commentary is something which has helped him gain fame in the art world. He has worked in a variety of media notably tyres and inner tubes, painting, drawing, performance, animation and film. The provocative nature of the artists’ works, and his active role within art world in New York have kept him in the spotlight in both American and Italian contemporary art scenes.
Cardi Gallery is exhibiting the first major solo show of Paolo Canevari’s works in UK. The exhibition explores the 30 years of artist’s practice. This exhibition titled ‘Self-portrait / Autoritratto’ occupies for floor at Cardi London in Mayfair and brings together 30 works. The works in the exhibition includes sculptures, drawings and installation that range from the artist’s notorious 1990s rubber sculptures to his most current series ‘Monuments of the Memory: Landscapes’ and ‘Constellations’. Many of the works are shown here for the first time.
The ambiguity of Canevari’s artworks, suspended in their brutalist aesthetic between irony and disquiet, is a successful result of both conceptual and formal transformation of industrial materials. Oil and its applications (synthetic rubber, exhaust motor oil, etc) are at the heart of his vocabulary; in his hands they become ambiguous symbols of the systemic violence that permeates today’s declining world.
“To me, an artwork is profoundly important when it does not recoil into a oneway structure – whether ideological or technical – but when it opens up to different perspectives for the viewer, therefore broadening their thought.” Paolo Canevari.
Since his first solo show in 1991, in which he started using car tubes and tyres, Canevari has developed a personal language aimed at revisiting the everyday and the most intimate aspects of memory. Over the years, and through the employment of a variety of media and techniques, from animation to large-format drawings, videos and installations, his projects have taken on a strong conceptual connotation. Focusing on the use of symbols, icons and images that are part of the collective memory, his works often invite viewers into a direct confrontation.