Marcelo Canevari

Marcelo Canevari paints dreamlike scenes in which the natural world begins to feel slightly off. He came to painting from scientific illustration of Argentine fauna and flora, made alongside his father, and now draws on memory, folklore and childhood. Masked and anthropomorphic figures, soldiers, unicorns and butterflies move through landscapes of mountains, round-topped trees, meteorites, eclipses and gathering storms, caught somewhere between innocence and menace. Canevari stages these scenes with theatrical light that guides the eye while deliberately keeping the story open, and he treats colour as relational, each hue changing with whatever sits beside it. In paintings made together with Ornella Pocetti, he draws on medieval painting and the look of 1950s pulp magazines.