Buenos Aires
Fuerza Mayor
Canevari /
Curator
Text by Daniel Santoro
Aug. 28, 2026 — Oct. 3, 2026
About exhibition
Literature first, and painting later, were born in the shadow of myths. And it is this symbolic fabric that Marcelo Canevari uses to construct his worlds of formal equivalences, with the passion and attention to detail of a naturalist and the subtlety of a mythographer-painter. His work provokes true and joyful epiphanies, helping us ward off the atavistic horror of finding ourselves irretrievably thrown into existence, condemned to the search for meaning. All those small figures exposed to the fury of the elements and to gigantic tectonic caprices are far removed from resembling those old subjects of the canon of our political art: corpulent, with clenched fists and fully conscious of their mission.
THE FIRST MYTH IS THE WORLD ITSELF*
It is said that myths vertically traverse the world and our bodies; myths are the threads with which the symbolic fabric is woven, reminding us that we are only a small part, connected to something much greater than ourselves that transcends us. Myths help us experience a fuller existence and prevent us from sinking into banal rational speculations.
Literature first, and painting later, were born in the shadow of myths. And it is this symbolic fabric that Marcelo Canevari uses to construct his worlds of formal equivalences, with the passion and attention to detail of a naturalist and the subtlety of a mythographer-painter. His work provokes true and joyful epiphanies, helping us ward off the atavistic horror of finding ourselves irretrievably thrown into existence, condemned to the search for meaning. All those small figures exposed to the fury of the elements and to gigantic tectonic caprices are far removed from resembling those old subjects of the canon of our political art: corpulent, with clenched fists and fully conscious of their mission.
By contrast, the figures Marcelo Canevari paints have the appearance of modest and troubled toys of fate, acting out their existence as best they can within those vast landscapes that never quite surrender their secrets.
And yet, the landscape questions us obscurely: what is reality? What happens in that clearing in the forest when an event occurs that establishes violence as the ultimate truth? Thus we find ourselves wandering, our gaze attentive, along the paths of the forest, accompanied by those abandoned, hooded characters, wishing to be someone else, amid striking metamorphoses and other physiological alterations displayed with the pride and tenderness of a therian.
Ultimately, they and we are searching, like Dante, for that vertical axis along which things circulate between heaven and the inferno, in the hope of achieving, at least for now, a certain precarious order that might justify our existence.
— Daniel Santoro, 2026
Quote from Roberto Calasso
Aizicovich /
Melodía Encadenada
Pocetti /
Curada de espanto
Renata Juncadella / Verónica Gómez /
Juntar los bordes de la noche
Aizicovich /
Habla para que pueda verte
PECCI CAROU /
The Vigil of Eros
LEVY /
Third Spectral Atomic
PAREDES /
A handful of earth
JUNCADELLA /
What cuts is a shortcut
GIMÉNEZ /
Shell for something immense
CALFAT /
Principle of innerness
PAREDES /
El jardín interior
VALENTINI /
La frontera fantasma
GRADÍN /
Genealogía Vegetal
GÓMEZ /
Las vestiduras peligrosas
