The Hercules Hall of Palazzo d’Accursio is hosting, until the end of the month, the exhibition Colors and Sounds of the Origins. The works of artist Andrea Benetti, accompanied by the music of Frank Nemola, engage in a dialogue between past and present, guiding humanity toward a rediscovery of the senses.
Since Saturday, April 13, visitors in Bologna can explore the contemporary art exhibition Colors and Sounds of the Origins at the City Hall (Palazzo d’Accursio, Piazza Maggiore 6). This project stems from the collaboration between Bologna-born painter Andrea Benetti (b. 1964), the creator of the Neo-Cave Art Manifesto, and Italian musician Frank Nemola. The exhibition, curated by Silvia Grandi, professor at the Department of Visual, Performing, and Media Arts at the University of Bologna, is promoted by Friends of the Johns Hopkins University/Associazione di cultura e studio italo-americana “Luciano Finelli” and enjoys the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, the Province, and the Municipality of Bologna.
The exhibition features thirty Neo-Cave paintings, musically accompanied throughout the entire duration of the show by a performance composed and performed specifically for Benetti’s canvases by Nemola, a prominent figure in the Italian music scene and a multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Vasco Rossi. Colors and Sounds of the Origins emerges from the creative research of these two artists, whose last collaboration dates back to 2011, when they presented a project combining two powerful expressive media—music and painting—inside the Castellana Caves. Now, through a renewed fusion of their talents, Benetti and Nemola create a project of acoustic art, seeking the origins of humanity within a contemporary context.
Their artistic union oscillates between ancient, essential, and symbolic pictorial forms—quintessentially cavernous—and the digital mass communication systems of today. This approach reclaims and revitalizes the two most fundamental senses of both our origins and modernity: sight and hearing. The decision to construct a system of symbols that require interpretation and harken back to the age of caves represents a necessary reset of representation in a contemporary world that is collapsing in on itself, lost within its own injustices, and, in doing so, compromising human dignity.
Benetti and Nemola’s work is, therefore, also an exercise in complementarity, pairing the vibrantly chromatic icons of the paintings with the most modern of soundscapes. Furthermore, it succeeds in reviving the colors, musicality, and forms of humanity’s earliest age. In an entirely contemporary way, it marks a return to the sensoriality of the origins—a concept identified as early as 1967 by Marshall McLuhan through the notions of “visual space” and “acoustic space.” Thanks to the spread of electronic media, human beings can return to a primordial and complete sensory structure, rich with emotions that, through synesthesia, traverse all five senses.