Ezra Pound emerges in agitation: the polyethylene strips building his face are more densely tangled than in any other work in the series, and the figure extends outward in thin wire-like projections reading as fingers, beard-strands, or simply the overflow of a restless energy that cannot be contained within a portrait frame. The eyes, in contrasting red, are set off-axis, one a small circle, one a larger oval: the asymmetry gives the face its driven, unsettled character.
Ezra Pound emerges in agitation: the polyethylene strips building his face are more densely tangled than in any other work in the series, and the figure extends outward in thin wire-like projections reading as fingers, beard-strands, or simply the overflow of a restless energy that cannot be contained within a portrait frame. The eyes, in contrasting red, are set off-axis, one a small circle, one a larger oval: the asymmetry gives the face its driven, unsettled character.
The choice of subject is pointed. Ezra Pound spent years in a mental institution, years in Fascist Italy, decades at the center of an argument about whether artistic genius can be separated from moral catastrophe: a figure for whom that division is not a critical convenience but a real, unresolved problem. The translucent plastic portrait does not resolve it either. The face is present and absent simultaneously, features legible and dissolving at once, the portrait formally enacting the instability it takes as its subject.
The portrait is not a document of Pound's appearance but a reading of his condition: the dense tangle of the central mass, the wire-like extensions reaching outward, the asymmetric eyes reading as arrested motion, a figure caught in mid-thought or mid-outburst, at the boundary between genius and catastrophe, composure and dissolution. Canevari's formation through the painter Corrado Cagli, himself a figure who had navigated artistic practice and political history in postwar Italy with complexity and cost, gives particular resonance to this choice of subject: the portrait of a difficult man made by a sculptor formed by a difficult history.
The dark ground of the Neri [Blacks] works is not passive background but active stage, a logic Canevari developed across decades of collaboration with Andrea Camilleri on productions that sought to dissolve the boundary between performer and audience through light and material rather than scenic machinery. In this work the stage logic is at its most charged: Pound emerges from darkness as figures emerge under a spotlight, simultaneously revealed and incomplete, the darkness around him participating in the portrait. The aesthetic logic had roots that ran back decades: working with Camilleri on the 1977 Rai broadcast of Beckett's All That Fall, Canevari and Camilleri had jointly decided to shoot in black and white despite color television having been standard for years. That decision established a precedent. In the Neri works, made a quarter-century later, the same conviction operates at the material level: the polyethylene is colorless by choice, not by limitation, the achromatic commitment of a sculptor who had already proved he understood what color withheld could do.
