Remembering. The greatest cognitive endowment granted to living beings, and at the same time the gap that separates humans from their biological counterparts. Not so much in the mechanisms of acquiring and preserving experiences, which are characteristic of almost all species, but rather in the ability to express memories and exert their power through signs. The difficult evolutionary journey of the human species, from the earliest prehominid forms to the current—seemingly completed—manifestations of the so-called “sapiens,” has essentially consisted of a progressive appropriation of memory. It has not been a simple or linear path. Unlike other things, which retain an inert reminiscence as they progressively dissolve over time, as their matter decays, humans have had to create a separation between themselves and what happens around them. To internalize events, to fix their contours in images that remain constantly accessible, they had to entrust their representation with what would otherwise have been impossible to preserve. Perhaps from the very beginning, they understood that two opposing tendencies work within the mind: one that fixes thoughts and keeps them alive, and another that tends to erase them. Not entirely, of course, as traces remain indelible, sedimenting into a mass of fragments of awareness—pale specters that will resurface at some unknown time, in some unknown place, even generations later, without any possibility of tracing their origin. The oldest cave paintings, the abstract or realistic engravings that carve the walls of countless caves around the world, almost certainly functioned as mnemonic devices: visual tools for preserving time, for capturing constantly changing ideas, for remembering the future. For those humans in constant danger, preserving memory meant making even fear auspicious, domesticating the unknown, seeing beyond what was immediately perceptible. Images help to understand, and they are themselves knowledge.
For several decades now, Andrea Benetti’s painting has sought to retrace the steps of ancient, nameless masters and restore art to its original essence as a mechanism of memory: a spiritual expression of being, emotionally spontaneous, free from the constraints of mimetic form. Representations are a projection of the mind extended beyond the self, the irrepressible necessity to shape the world to make it comprehensible and more easily dominable. From his earliest works, the artist has identified with the creative desire of the first humans, with their need to leave traces that spoke first and foremost to themselves, to exorcise their fears. Benetti did not settle for adopting a primitivism that had been acclimatized in Western art for over a century. Imitating forms from unknown eras seemed to him a trivialization of messages that would have resulted in a sterile and anachronistic revival of a world irreconcilable with the present. Thus, he experimented with archetypal techniques and materials, natural pigments of immemorial origin, embracing the idea that art is not separate from nature but a product of the earth itself, and that it is the artist’s duty merely to follow his creative impulse.
The partnership with Dario Binetti may have been inscribed even in the near-homophony of their names and their identical birth dates. The Salento-born artist, in a different way, has followed a path parallel to that of his Emilian friend. At a time when photography has pursued the whirlwind process of technical innovation, leading, along with an increasingly high-definition image, to the complete dematerialization of the product, Binetti has chosen to return to the origins of photographic representation. The use of the darkroom and black-and-white photography, with sometimes extremely long exposure times, has always allowed him to render reality in a way that is not a mere mechanical reproduction of the visible. The places observed through Binetti’s eye and camera acquire a numinous atmosphere, record ineffable presences, and reveal a world that even the most technologically advanced photographic instrument could not capture. If, in his rendering of the human figure, through sculptural poses that lift bodily elements out of darkness, Binetti may recall Robert Mapplethorpe and his ability to grasp the spiritual essence of his subjects in their anatomical epiphany, in evoking places, he returns to the origins of photography and to that movement that entrusted the camera with the role of a medium connecting to another dimension. Ancient buildings, shadowed hypogea, corridors with crumbling walls offer his lens the invisible images of what has been absorbed over time.
With the “Light in the silence” collection, Benetti and Binetti have revolutionized representational technique and the very ability of forms to present themselves to the living. The name of the collection itself evokes an inversion of the traditional commemorative function of images: the abyssal rock formations of the Castellana Caves emerge as a primordial dimension of existence, a time when the creative process seems yet to begin, and everything remains indistinct in a network of fossilized veins. Darkness becomes the vortex that swallows experiences, and the absence of time is simultaneously the nonexistence of memory. In this place, which evokes the beginnings of all things, nature seems not yet to have begun its metamorphosis. The cavern is the space of primordial unity, the place where consciousness and knowledge are not yet separate, exactly as in the Platonic myth. In The Republic, the cave is a protected place: it may indeed harbor the illusion that the shadows projected on its walls are an actual reality, and the prisoners’ inability to move is a symptom of their subjugation and ignorance. Yet, it is from that primordial state that things must emerge to differentiate themselves from undetermined chaos.
Here, the two artists found the setting for a new, astonishing technical and representational experiment. The scenes seem to evoke the tableaux of a Gothic novel, silently populated by hooded figures engaged in a mysterious initiation rite. Everywhere lingers the aesthetic dimension of the Sublime, understood in its most authentic sense within modern sensibility: from those depths arise enigma, immeasurable grandeur, contrasts between light and darkness, silence and the reverberation of shadows. Rarely, as in this case, have the artist’s technical ability and the photographer’s visual intelligence achieved such evocative effects: the photographs evoke an illusory depth, which, however, is entirely real thanks to the bas-relief surface prepared for printing the shots.
The Ascoli Piceno exhibition marks the highest point in the creative journey of Andrea Benetti and Dario Binetti, as it arrives at what is, for now, a definitive (yet still unfinished) reflection on the emotional power of images, their destiny, and the dualism between memory and oblivion—themes that constitute the very essence of our existence in the world.