Born in Buenos Aires, Marcelo Canevari’s dad was a naturalist who worked as a wildlife illustrator. When Canevari was around sixteen, his dad offered to teach him, and they worked together on field guides for the mammals and migrating birds of Argentina. Eventually though, Canevari found the strict representation to be limiting. Today, Canevari’s paintings combine the narrative landscape style of Flemish masters like Pieter Bruegel with scenes of Argentinian nature. Look closer, however, and things are amiss. “My trick is: ‘Come on in. You know this place, you are safe,’” Caneveri says. “And once you are [in the painting], you know that you are maybe not as safe as you thought you were.” 

In 2016, Canevari was the victim of a brutal, random attack on the street, which was a turning point in his practice. He started to include darker elements and themes in his work. There are tigers and jungles and waterfalls, but also figures dressed as ghosts, children wearing creepy masks, and octopuses climbing trees. Inspired by the way fairy tales navigate the “border between innocence and darkness,” Canevari’s paintings are carnivalesque studies of both the human subconscious and natural environments. “You enter this world where rules will change,” he says. 

His father passed away in 2023. In the process of grieving, “I was trying to mimic what we used to do, and I realized—he wasn’t there,” Canevari says. So he started to include an untouched area amongst the lush scenes, an empty canvas within the canvas, a sort of ode to his father’s absence, but also presence. This year, his work turned to “explosions of nature,” erupting volcanoes, lightning storms, and raining meteorites. But still, “the only element that I kept,” he says, “was this empty canvas shape on one side of the painting.”