This edition of Paesaggi by Paolo Canevari consists of a sealed glass bottle containing used motor oil, resting on a white velvet cushion and housed in a black lacquered box. 
The edition consists of 15 numbered copies, from 1 to 15, each signed and dated by the artist. This edition is published by Giordano Boetti and curated by Giuliana Benassi.

Perhaps one morning while wandering in glassy air,
barren, turning around I shall see the miracle unfold:
nothingness over my shoulder, vacuum behind
me, feeling the dread of a drunk.
Then as on a screen, trees houses hills
will briskly settle for the habitual deception.
But it shall be too late; and I'll wander on silently
among people who do not turn around, with my secret.

Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro, Eugenio Montale, 1923 - translated by Alexander F. Ritter


Not just one, but a multitude of landscapes. Horizontal lines that alternate on their own horizon. A tautology of landscapes, a play of hues, the boundaries of space and time.

Paesaggi by Paolo Canevari is the plural title of the work created for Giordano Boetti Editions: a half-filled bottle of used oil lies on a white velvet cushion inside a black lacquered wooden box. The work consists of 15 numbered pieces, from 1 to 15, each signed and dated by the artist. The artist composes a visual symphony where the oil, a relic of an industrial and polluted world, transforms into a pictorial pigment, giving life to evanescent landscapes laden with meaning. Each movement of the bottle traces elusive pictorial borders. The glassy surface welcomes the dense black substance in a thousand different shades, each time unique, letting it flow slowly, like grains of sand in an hourglass. The work explores the temporal and spatial dimensions of the theme of the landscape, surpassing geographic limits, condensing land and sea into a single moment, evoking the past and pointing to the future.

Canevari has frequently explored the theme of the landscape — a monochromatic, black landscape. In the series titled Landscape, for example, he created works on paper (even on pages from books or newspapers) where used motor oil is applied as a pigment to outline the profile of a mountain or hillside scene. The oil, dense and heavy, carries with it the history of its past use. In this way, the oil becomes a symbolic essence of pollution: not just environmental pollution, but also pollution of information and communication.

While in the works on paper the landscape is fixed once and for all, compromising the use of printed paper as a place of thought, in the Paesaggi edition Canevari suspends the stigmatization of a single image in favor of multiple appearances touched by light. Thus, the gaze becomes a way of seeing through, a suggestion to go beyond. The black liquid, captured inside the bottle, becomes an objective fact and a subjective experience. In the impossibility of fixing an image, the work also reflects the elusiveness of the digital information world, which passes and transforms without ever being fully possessed, constantly changing and forgotten, racing by like lightning bolts. In this loss of memory, in this acceleration, the work imposes itself through its materiality, condensing memory and holding onto time.

It insinuates itself as an epiphany of the “habitual deception,” portraying each landscape as both political and mystical at the same time.

Giuliana Benassi