A woman and her dog are caught in a gust of wind, their forms already dissolving into the force that moves them. Canevari builds both figures from translucent polyethylene sheeting on dark board, the material performing what the subject describes: something light, temporary, half-present. The plastic twists into the suggestion of figures without ever fully committing to them, and the dark ground presses through the translucency, adding depth to what might otherwise read as pure surface.
A woman and her dog are caught in a gust of wind, their forms already dissolving into the force that moves them. Canevari builds both figures from translucent polyethylene sheeting on dark board, the material performing what the subject describes: something light, temporary, half-present. The plastic twists into the suggestion of figures without ever fully committing to them, and the dark ground presses through the translucency, adding depth to what might otherwise read as pure surface.
The tension that drives this work is the tension between material illegibility and figurative legibility: the polyethylene cannot produce likeness in any conventional sense, yet the woman and her dog are instantly recognizable, their postures streaming in the same diagonal direction, the leash a taut line connecting two forms equally given over to the wind. The red eyes of both figures are the decisive formal choice, the single chromatic note in an otherwise achromatic work. Without them, the work risks becoming pure weather. With them, it becomes a meditation on what persists in a figure when everything else is being stripped away: a center of consciousness within the dissolution.
The Futurist painters were the first to propose that motion could be the primary subject of a figurative work, form giving way to the energy passing through it. Giacomo Balla's 1912 canvas showing a dachshund and its owner rendered as overlapping motion-streaks is the founding Italian image of that proposition. Canevari arrives at the same subject, a woman and dog in motion, through entirely different means: not the multiplication of sequential positions but the choice of a material that is itself always in motion, always catching light differently, never fully resolved into solid form.
The Neri [Blacks] works connect to Canevari's practice as a set designer for theater in the tradition of the avant-garde collaboration between art and theater: Andrea Camilleri, with whom he worked across decades, consistently sought to dissolve the boundary between stage and audience, using light and material rather than heavy machinery to define space. The logic of the lit stage is embedded in these works, figures emerging from darkness, the dark board the stage, the polyethylene lit from the front, the translucency creating the effect of a presence not quite solidified.
