Paolo Canevari, Visual Interview No. 05
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Paolo Canevari is one of the world-renowned artists of his generation, known for his use of different materials and media, such as animation, painting, video, sculpture, performance and installations. The artist proposes easily recognizable symbols or clichés, to evoke concepts such as religion, urban myths of happiness, or the great principles underlying creation and destruction.
Since 2011 he has started with the Traces of Memory series of works, a quest based on the traditional languages of painting, drawing and sculpture. Through technical linguistic distractions, he investigates the personal, the intimate and the inner, in relation to a work of art and its universal meaning. While it is about the recognizability of the forms and dimensions of the common artistic and cultural heritage, it focuses on the absence, the power of the individual imagination, the concept of identity, detached from the pervasive need for social recognition, and finally on the need to build its own iconography, unconditioned by the continuous visual stimuli of the consumption system.
Do you think art can have social value?
Moravian Paraphrase: The role of the artist in society is to be asocial, thus questioning the status quo, mass conformity and the political system in the service of the consumer economy. Art awakens us from mental passivity: its social value is that it is an entity capable of generating thought. Work is something that raises questions, raises mysteries and doubts about its true nature and meaning. It is a mental stimulator that weaves structures of meaning. For this reason, artwork is inconsistent with our daily lives, intended to pursue practical goals and organized by things whose function and purpose we already know.
The only element outside this usual context of representation and thinking is the artwork. That is why it seems strange to us. Art has a social value only and exclusively as an entity that creates values, and not as a tool aimed at a practical goal.
How it works? What is your daily life?
In a very simple way: I am waiting for the idea that can reach the most disparate and abnormal moment. For this, I do not spend my time in a specific place, in the studio for example. It is a practice that I consider harmful, and it is an imposition of thought. Indeed, thoughts and intuitions settle into everyday life until they find (by themselves) their own form. I often create work in a short time, using basic techniques, because I believe in executive simplicity that emphasizes poetic gesture and that can be democratically understood as a process. I hate stunning and searching effects, which are also very popular in art today. In my work, I try to draw a human dimension to the work, intimate-personal-simple-
Choose a place. How will you convert it?
Places and contexts can play a crucial role in interpreting constructs, offers Or shots taken in prominent places. I think for example of my video bouncing skull (2006), was shot in Belgrade at Milosevic’s former residence, and bombed by NATO in 1999. When I choose a place, I try to respect its history and its nature, and I try to tell it in terms of working to make it an integral part of it. Choosing a church, a forest or a museum as a place to work is very different: the meaning of the artwork is also perceived in relation to the context.
But with sculpting, things are different. Sculpture, in the purely classical sense, does not require voids or supports: carving is simply that.
Even in the warehouse David Michelangelo will always retain his expressive power. It’s his own thing and that makes him self-sufficient, even in relation to a potential audience. That is why, after all, I do not think that it is works of art that need our presence, but we need theirs.
“Between 2009 and 2010, I began to realize that my research had reached a limit, imposed by method and changing linguistic structure. The globalized information system, through the Web and social networks, absorbed and made the linguistic structures belonging to contemporary art and artists; the system has reached us, And he understood our language by assimilating it and exploiting it for his own purposes. Thus the political significance and power of the image diminished. They were no longer an exception in the panorama of contemporary language, but simply the rule. So I began to rethink the role of the image through the tool of memory, and to think about what cannot be reproduced because it is not It contains an image. What interested me was the expressive potential that arises when the concept and content of a work relates only to form and its evocative power. It meant not searching for content in the image but in its absence.”
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