A sculptor, installation artist and performance artist, Paolo Canevari is well known for his works made from rubber tyres and inner tubing. Canevari is attracted to the material because of its flexibility, its capacity to assume an endless variety of forms.
Descended from three generations of artists, and born in Rome, a city famed for its architectural and artistic heritage, Canevari’s choice of material is also a conscious rejection of the traditional materials of the ‘classical’ artist. His work often explores the complex relationship he has with this ancestry – for him, at once a burden and an inescapable influence. In Colosso (2002), he covered a gallery floor with miniature copies of Rome’s Colosseum cut from tyres, while in an opening performance, he himself took on the role of Atlas, bearing the weight of a colosseum on his shoulders.
Canevari is wary of the monumental, and much of his work is ephemeral. In an early series of sculptures, Camera d’aria (1991), he hung sections cut from inner tubing on the wall, and manipulated them so that they took on recognisable shapes (anatomical forms, or objects such as helmets or shells). When removed from display, the sculptures quickly lose their shape, and return to their material state. Canevari notes: ‘I don’t want my work to be permanent; I want it to be a memory, to have a metaphysical presence’. In a more recent intervention, Canevari created an entrance to the lift in his apartment block by squeezing an inflated inner tube into the doorway, evoking an image of female genitalia. This installation, Mamma (2000), recalls the artist’s own birth in a lift and invites visitors to reflect upon the idea of birth.
