This time, the project—curated by interior designer Micaela Mazzoni and curator Licia Mazzoni—features artist Andrea Benetti (Bologna, 1964), founder of the Manifesto of Neo-Cave Art, presented in 2009 at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Benetti is the interpreter of a poetics in which the creative act returns to being a ritual of reclaiming space and memory.

The exhibition suggests the idea of a threshold as a crossing point between past and present. As with the Villanova installation, the selection of the thirteen artworks presented at Casalecchio aims to enhance architectural openings and window systems as symbolic portals regulating transitions between worlds: between interior and exterior spaces, intimacy and openness, individuality and community.

Within this perspective, Andrea Benetti’s artistic research resonates with archetypal force: just as Paleolithic humans engraved rock surfaces to mark foundational moments of their existence, impressing a shared and ritual memory onto cave walls, his works reactivate that primordial gesture, transforming the environment into a living trace, into testimony of a passage, of a presence.

The Atelier thus becomes a contemporary inhabited cave, an intimate and almost initiatory place in which visitors are invited to cross not only physical thresholds but perceptual ones as well.

Regarding Andrea Benetti’s artistic research, his work can be understood as a sophisticated temporal bridge: a visual investigation that does not merely rely on stylistic quotation, but rather aspires toward a genuine primordial reconnection with the roots of human expression.

Through the series presented in these collections, the artist undertakes a rigorous investigation aimed at deconstructing the idea of abstraction as an exclusively modern phenomenon, relocating its roots to the very heart of Prehistory.