Beyond the image

An encounter with Paolo Canevari: his art, his city

Because I’m an ancient man, who has read the classics, gathered grapes in the vineyard, contemplated the sun rising and setting over the fields, among the old, faithful neighs, among the holy bleats (…)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Almost a testament, in Pasolini: Essays on politics and society.

Paolo Canevari in front of his work “Monumenti della Memoria”

The exchange of emails with Paolo before working on the piece had this quotation at the foot – he explained that he felt these words of Pasolini’s on his skin. We decided to begin our introduction to his Rome in images precisely with a fragment of Pasolini’s words.

Itinerary of Paolo Canevari

Internationally renowned, Canevari uses different materials and media: animation, drawing, video, sculpture and installations. His work had an evolution between 2009 and 2010, as he tells us “The globalized system had subsumed the language of art, absorbing it. The power of the image had been redimensioned: it was no longer an exception in the panorama of contemporary language, but simply the norm. So I began to rethink the role of image through the tool of memory, reflecting on what could not be reproduced because it did not have an image (…) It meant no longer searching for the content in the image but in its absence”.

Lupa