Two river pebbles rest on a large panel of tawny leather: one toward the upper center, one toward the lower left. The leather is cut into a shape whose edges flow in gentle curves that recall the outline of a hide, which is precisely what it is. Each stone presses a small indentation into the surface, and the leather responds, bending fractionally around the weight. That exchange, stone on leather, geological permanence on processed organic material, is the subject of the work.
Two river pebbles rest on a large panel of tawny leather: one toward the upper center, one toward the lower left. The leather is cut into a shape whose edges flow in gentle curves that recall the outline of a hide, which is precisely what it is. Each stone presses a small indentation into the surface, and the leather responds, bending fractionally around the weight. That exchange, stone on leather, geological permanence on processed organic material, is the subject of the work.
Canevari named this series after Bernini's concept of the mirabile composto: the marvelous compound, the fusion of seemingly opposed elements, permanence and transience, body and soul. In the Mirabile works the materials carry this opposition literally and without mediation. Leather is organic, processed, culturally saturated as animal skin: it shows the knife in its cut edges and the stone in its slight indentation. The stone shows nothing of the artist. It arrived smooth from a river, carrying millennia of its own history, and Canevari placed it. That asymmetry of intervention is the conceptual content: the artist present in the organic material, absent in the geological one.
The intelligence of these works lies precisely in what was withheld. The leather is minimally handled; the stone is entirely unworked; the intervention is limited to selection and placement. This is sculpture understood as arrangement and attention rather than fabrication and transformation. Carl Andre's floor pieces operate on a comparable principle: the sculptural act as the decision of where to place a material element, the meaning residing in relationship and placement rather than in any physical working of the material. Canevari's version is warmer, more textural, more culturally weighted, the organic material of the Baroque tradition brought into contact with something entirely pre-cultural, but the formal proposition is shared: to make without making-over.
The leather in these works is not a primitive or naive material choice. It is a sophisticated decision by a sculptor who had spent decades with bronze, who understood the weight of the casting tradition from the inside. The Mirabile series does not retreat from that tradition; it compresses it into a different register: same attention, same precision, different scale of intervention.
