There is a quest for the archaic and the ancestral in the works of Andrea Benetti and Dario Binetti.
Dostoevsky once said: “It is said that Art must reflect life, but all of that is nonsense; the writer (the poet) creates life himself, and a life so complete that before him, it did not exist in its fullness.” The artist’s imagination emerges from the deepest, most hidden layers of his being, and that becomes his life—perhaps. The photographs in this exhibition—or rather, the images of archaic women within the profound abyss of the Earth, like in the caves—transport us into the artist’s realm of imagination. A place unknown to him, one that he must bring to life, give breath to. How many times, while playing, have we felt close to the origin of everything? It is the vibration immersed in doubt that draws us nearer to the genesis of things. Entering a cave to create cinematic stagings, with well-defined characters in the search for the archaic, is to experience fear and, at the same time, to play. Fear and Play are fundamental ingredients that lead us closer to Doubt. Primitive man, I believe, doubted—or perhaps, now that I write it, he doubted himself—because he did not know, he had no experience of the World; he simply experimented. These works return us to this primitive dimension, urging us to reclaim mystery, to embrace the unknown, to rediscover the vital rhythm of things, and the very freedom to be what we wish—to step into the most terrifying abysses and, at the same time, to play, to stage a reality that does not exist, one that only comes to life in the moment the artist imagines it and reveals it to us.
Tarkovsky once said: “The image is called upon to express life itself, and not concepts and reflections on life.” And life itself is what we reclaim as we walk Towards the Unknown, discovering the Mystical Visions of Andrea Benetti and Dario Binetti.