A dense atmosphere, where space and time, sight and sound merge into a constant rhythmic movement of perceptual synesthesia. The ear intercepts cold layers of synthesizer sounds, where minimal electronic pulses rhythmically fall, while the eye travels through lines and images, archaic symbols, vibrant colors, and abstract shapes in the still frame of a canvas. We find ourselves in the coordinate-free universe of Andrea Benetti, supported by the musical dimension of Frank Nemola, where the subconscious surfaces without filters and instinctively imprints itself onto the canvas—a painting that imagines forms, juxtaposes them, and colors them vividly with the fantasy of a child.
As in the poetics of Joan Miró, fragments of reality freely blend, intertwining with curved lines in an unreal dimension—a skillful play of compositional balance and a sense of movement where the brilliance of oil color reigns. Andrea Benetti’s art transcends temporal dynamics, linking the beginning to the end, the primordial world to the contemporary one. Like Paul Klee—an artist with whom he shares the dual vocation of musician and painter—Benetti shifts the perspective from today to yesterday, depicting a primitive environment where the aquatic and terrestrial seem to merge, and where stylized human figures coexist with abstract forms reminiscent of unicellular prehistoric beings.
Benetti’s works—plaster bas-reliefs on canvas, aged with natural pigments such as cocoa, hibiscus, and henna, then slightly plasticized and finally brought to life with vibrant oil pigments—transcend millennia, freeing themselves from the social constraints of contemporary man to rediscover the primordial essence of cave paintings at the dawn of humanity. Benetti’s Neo-Cave Art, whose manifesto was presented by the artist at the 53rd Venice Biennale, moves from primordial instinct, distancing itself from figurative realism to rediscover the strokes, symbols, and colors of a subconscious imbued with childlike wonder—where simplicity is synonymous with curiosity and imagination.
By bringing artistic expression back to its origins, Benetti goes beyond a pictorial revolution, aspiring to an anthropological and social revolution in which humanity, freed from the constraints of a vacuous consumerist system, can regain purity and respect for nature in all its infinite manifestations. Humanity must reclaim the course of history, follow its stratifications, and defend its dignity from blind arrogance and hollow hedonism. It must embrace primordial instinct to interpret the new world around it, cultivate a sense of mystery and doubt as a vital drive, and surrender to the simplicity and beauty of life.
Returning to the origins does not mean forgetting the present but rather creating a temporal bridge—viewing a changing universe with pure eyes. Thus, the artist, in a body of work parallel to these homages to the abstraction of cave painting, engages in the symbolic representation of archetypal elements of the contemporary world. Through bas-reliefs that mimic the rough surface of a hypothetical primitive cave, he represents the defining elements of our era. Like a primitive of the third millennium, the artist filters contemporary reality to grasp its essence, responding to the overwhelming imagery of advertising and the web with an expressive reductionism in which the object becomes the symbol of a serialized, mechanized, and industrialized lifestyle.
With an original bas-relief technique, the artist envisions describing his time to future generations through symbols, much like Homo sapiens once did—schematizing the fruits of technological progress by depicting airplanes, ships, and motorbikes, and, not without irony, replacing the primitive figure of the hunter with that of a golfer.
We live in a plasticized world of consumer goods, where that primitive human approach to reality is fading—a world where people once oriented themselves by scent, touched things without fear of getting dirty, heard danger approaching, measured nature with their eyes, and tasted the true pleasure of fruit. Benetti and Nemola, blending two-dimensional images on canvas with electronic acoustic recordings, highlight how human perception today is dominated by sight and sound, overwhelmed by ever-present televisions and increasingly portable computers, at the expense of a holistic and complete sensory experience.
Benetti’s work is, therefore, an art-manifesto, where past and present, the primitive world and technological society, beginning and end merge—extremes of the same story, the story of humanity. Male and female complete each other in alchemical relationships (Alchemy of Love, 2012); dualities rotate in parallel (The Two Moons, 2008); diversities coexist (Diversity, 2009); memories resurface (My Childhood, 2009). Drawing and concept blend in the controlled improvisation of the pictorial gesture and the free creative flow.
It is this universal sense that defines Benetti’s art, and it is no coincidence that he chooses as his emblem the fusion of the whale—an animal of the ocean’s depths—and the eagle—a bird of the clear skies. The highest flyer and the deepest swimmer, with everything in between, including us.
We, today, with our sense of disorientation. We, tossed between the seductions of advertising, manipulated truths, and the uncertainties of economic crises. We, hoping for a fresh start.
It is precisely the awareness of the need for a reset that drives the artist toward the primitive dimension of art—paralleling the work of Jean Dubuffet in the early 1950s, when he instinctively reacted to the horrors of World War II, where even human solidarity had been subordinated to the color of uniforms. “Here I am, finally tired of all established images… I want to return things to their starting point, their point zero, before any vocabulary existed,” declared Dubuffet, theorizing Art Brut and exalting the primal level of human expression, valid beyond any ideology and era.
Beyond any era, then. And so today, Andrea Benetti, with a unique and original expressive technique, shakes our consciences to rediscover the essence of existence through joyous mutual sharing—leading humanity to respect the natural pace of a flower’s growth, a pace once idolized by the Futurists in its acceleration, now entirely annulled by the simultaneity of modern communication.
The sense of primordial movement is at the heart of Andrea Benetti’s canvases—the rotating force of the images seems barely contained by their rectangular white frames. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, looking at one of these paintings tomorrow, I found the composition completely reversed.