Angelo Canevari (Rome, 1929 – Amelia, 2014) descends from a long lineage of artists active in Rome since the 17th century. His father was a Futurist painter famous for his large-scale mosaics, and his uncle was a renowned sculptor of monumental structures in marble and bronze. Canevari's artistic development took place in a studio atmosphere, inheriting classical techniques reminiscent of a Renaissance bottega. He concentrated primarily on lost wax bronze casting and dry point drawing. Both these merge in artworks like Saint George and the Dragon, created in the latter part of his life, sculptures that seem to be lines drawn in space.
Among several public commissions of Canevari’s work, the monumental doors of Belluno’s cathedral and a set of coins for the Vatican Mint stand out. He also developed a lifelong theatrical collaboration with the writer Andrea Camilleri.
Angelo Canevari melded the sculptural to the painterly and the painterly to the sculptural. His work reminds us of Alberti Burri, who also used diverse materials (like plastic and fabric) to express himself, but stuck to the limits of a four sided plane. Canevari delicately conjoined strips of bronze metal in his sculpture to evoke figures that are “archetypes”, like Sicilian marionettes. He brings the energetic drawing of a Daumier to the third dimension, using metallic paint to highlight some of their nervous fibers.
Like the Mannerist artists Canevari so admired, he delicately played with appearances; painted cardboard was also integrated to the bronze structures, and seems to possess their same hardness, while tense leather panels with rocks placed on their concave surface appear as soft as goose-down bedding.
Inside the artist lives the intuition that together with his inner self can create forms able to express it. A kind of language that, starting from an ancestral culture, can be articulated in an expression, shaping its own history. He will lead back every inspiration to that peculiar interpretative fashion, the only one he can use to read and communicate his ideas and his view of the world around him.
Everything he can capture from his life will be replaced in that perimeter, in that space. Every thought like a single stone will be picked up, interpreted, decoded and placed in the wall of creative construction, like fragments reborn to a new order. Art is the invention capable to manifest, through its continual metamorphose, the never ending process of creativity, the never ending process of life.
