PAOLO CANEVARI. GOD YEAR
- Jun 23
- 5 min read
24 june - 16 october 2026
Curated by Sergio Risaliti
The major exhibitions return to Forte Belvedere, and inaugurating this new season on 24 June will be Drama: Four Acts, a project by Fondazione MUS.E, with the scientific coordination of Museo Novecento and promoted by Comune di Firenze. The project consists of three exhibitions conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti. The first chapter is God Year by Paolo Canevari (Rome, 1963), a new exhibition developed through a dialogue between the curator and the artist.
One of the most internationally acclaimed Italian artists, Canevari is known for his use of a wide range of materials and media, including drawing, video, sculpture, installation, and performance. In his interdisciplinary practice, he employs common and easily recognizable objects and symbols to comment on—and often deconstruct and critique—ideologies, religious beliefs, political narratives, and the great myths of progress and social happiness. Having grown up in close contact with the practices of contemporary avant-gardes (Arte Povera, conceptual art, and performance art) and trained in sculpture within a family environment, he has consistently reinterpreted classical, Renaissance, modern, and modernist art through a contemporary lens. This distinctive approach has enabled the artist to engage with the world through both intellectual and practical intelligence.
“Paolo Canevari is one of the most authoritative and internationally recognized Italian artists, capable of questioning our time through works that address memory, conflict, power, and civic consciousness. With God Year, Forte Belvedere once again welcomes a major contemporary art exhibition, offering citizens and visitors an intense and thought-provoking experience. This project confirms Florence’s commitment not only to preserving its extraordinary cultural heritage, but also to being a place of cultural production, dialogue, and reflection on the present.” — Giovanni Bettarini, Councillor for Culture of Comune di Firenze.
“Canevari’s art confronts the viewer with the harshest and most tragic aspects of reality, conveying fratricidal violence and systems of domination and exploitation that are embedded in the language, behaviours, stereotypes and images of our time. He does so without the rhetoric typical of the media, which are sometimes complicit in the distortion of facts and images, as well as in the manipulation of the meaning of words and symbols. Canevari seems to tell us: the emperor has no clothes. With lightness and irony, his works reveal the cynicism of Economy and Capital, the destructive and oppressive nature of Power, and the conformist force of every Ideology, presenting the artwork as a material, anxious and unsettling object. As a tool for cognitive growth, awareness and creative regeneration. This is an art that opposes the desire for death and destructive impulses with a critical and courageous practice, one that understands love and tenderness, innocence and melancholy, combining the verticality of the icon with the communicative immediacy of familiar objects and universal symbols. It skilfully exploits double meanings and conceptual wordplay, creating an open work and a compassionate sense of participation in the fate of the world, in the unfolding of history and in the adventures of existence. A lyrical and dramatic counterpoint to the sirens of Power.” – Sergio Risaliti, Director of Museo Novecento.
For Canevari, the image performs a complex function and is never reduced to simple information or a mere caption. It is a poetic and iconic tool that fosters awareness and cognitive growth. From both an iconographic and symbolic perspective, it is always conceived and activated as an open experience, rich in multiple meanings. A Rolls-Royce is tattooed with the message “HO FAME”; a child bounces a skull amid the ruins of bombed buildings; small and large tanks made from the “skin” of tyres transform play into an image of war, and vice versa. A wooden figure of the Virgin Mary supports a tyre on her head as though it were a halo; nooses made from inner-tube rubber evoke sacrifice and condemnation; a man (the artist himself), elegantly dressed in black, welcomes with open arms an ordnance falling from the sky. A cut tyre is used to compose the word Dio on the wall, bringing together the material dimension of industrial civilisation and the spiritual one, the horizontal movement of the automobile and the vertical dimension of theology.
Canevari often works through the ambiguity of signs, materials and forms, transforming the most familiar images into unsettling presences, critical and deconstructive devices. His research emerges from the tension between the language of art and that of reality, between aesthetics and politics, placing cultural symbols, emblems of power, references to political and religious history, collective myths, stereotypes, clichés and everyday objects into dialogue—and often into conflict. Through these oppositions, he constructs a tragic vision of contemporary existence, in which every symbol may reveal its darker side and every image may become charged with contradictory and universal meanings.
The reflection on violence, memory, and the mechanisms of control, separation, and censorship that permeate contemporary society lies at the heart of the exhibition. These themes are explored through the use of humble industrial materials such as tire rubber, which becomes a metaphor for social conditions and for the dangers arising from the exploitation of energy resources. Oil, its derivatives, and the automotive industry are placed under scrutiny. Black gold remains one of the most powerful instruments of geopolitical supremacy, a source of wealth and global dominance. While still considered essential to progress, it is also a resource capable of triggering wars and financial crises. Exemplary in this regard is the work Landscape, in which an American flag covers a pile of barrels and tires resembling a coffin. The piece offers a powerful and incisive reflection on the close relationship between petroleum and American global power.
The exhibition title itself, God Year, derives from the name of one of the world’s best-known tire manufacturers, while simultaneously evoking “the year of the Lord.” The phrase reveals how thin the boundary can be between the sacred and the profane, between bearers of peace and producers of death, between progress and poverty, between truth and false rhetoric.
In many of his works, Canevari also draws upon the dimensions of play and sacrifice, two elements that are only seemingly opposed. Play assumes both a cathartic and a perverse function: beneath the lightness of ludic action lie dynamics of domination, collective rituals, and symbolic forms charged with violence. Sacrifice, in turn, recalls ancient archetypes and deep structures of the collective unconscious, becoming a means through which Canevari interrogates the contradictions of history and contemporary society, as well as the destructive drives and death instincts that permeate individuals, groups, followers, and masses guided or subordinated by ideals of death or racial supremacy. It is precisely within this oscillation between innocence and cruelty, irony and tragedy, play and violence, that his work finds some of its most powerful expressions.
In collaboration with Galleria Christian Stein and Petri Corse Automobili Rolls-Royce Sales & Service Specialist Firenze.
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