For Homo sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic, images represent the oldest form of reality projection, fixed onto the walls of caves as a response to vital necessities. For this early modern humanity, horses and aurochs dominate the visual landscape of the most significant Paleolithic caves across Europe, from Lascaux to Altamira, up to the awe-inspiring depictions of rhinoceroses, bison, and horses in the Chauvet Cave, dating back more than thirty thousand years. The need to transfer biological elements from the natural environment into a symbolic dimension led Homo sapiens to entrust the walls of caves with hopes and expectations, visualized in the images of the Paleolithic bestiary, essential for survival. The representations of so-called “rock art,” complemented by artifacts of portable art, have always been considered indicative of Homo sapiens’ ability to project the external world into a dimension that, while realistic, also implied a participation that was not only physical but also psychological—justified by the fulfillment of the symbolic needs of those who produced these figurative representations. As a result, decorated caves, beyond illustrating the visual culture of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, also reveal—through the emergence of abstract signs—a fundamental necessity to codify symbolism into more easily comprehensible and transmissible signs.
«The reproduction and visual interpretation of reality, intrinsic elements of Gravettian veristic art, become conceptualized through the development of signs that express a universal awareness of something immaterial, metaphysical, communicated through a simple, immediate, and shared graphic language. For too long considered subordinate to art, these expressions are instead a fundamental human achievement—a true symbolic language that, after millions of years, propels humankind from reality to abstraction.»¹
The discovery of the buried pregnant woman with a fetus, interred approximately 28,000 years ago in the Agnano Cave at Ostuni through a complex ritual that involved the deification of the deceased—symbolically adorned like the Gravettian steatopygous figurines found throughout Paleolithic Europe and surrounded by remains of horses and aurochs—connects us to the same symbolic needs present in parietal and portable representations. The presence of a cortical flint pebble beneath the head of the deceased, marked with ochre and parallel incisions, attests to the necessity of expressing meaning through a synthetic, comprehensible, and highly significant graphic language. The hatch-mark motif, in all its forms and abstract evolutions from the Gravettian period to the end of the Pleistocene, became the leitmotif of European prehistory and the defining expression of an authentic symbolic graphic system.
Observing the hatch marks on the back of the ivory figurine from Lespugue, the signs carved into the horn of the Laussel bas-relief, or the hair of the Venus of Brassempouy, it becomes evident that between the Gravettian and Epigravettian periods, signs and sculptural representations were used in a complementary manner to emphasize the divine nature of the figures. In most surveys of Upper Paleolithic European art, female representations, animals, symbolic ornaments, as well as tools, weapons, and pendants, are almost always accompanied by the repeated use of the hatch-mark motif. If these signs had no specific symbolic meaning, their mere decorative presence would be unjustifiable in the context of such sophisticated artistic creations. This recurring motif, already present in the earliest phases of European prehistory, persisted until the Late Pleistocene, attesting to the universal value of hunter-gatherer ideology, perhaps for well over twenty thousand years.
Andrea Benetti’s Neo-Cave drawings depict animals, humans, oracles, and shamans—reinterpreted and revisited as an homage to Rock Art—culminating, with the origins of Abstract Art, in the level of synthesis achieved by Paleolithic humans at the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. A “Primitivist in the Third Millennium” was needed to reread the history of humankind, and this journey through the origins of art by Andrea Benetti is less an inquiry into pristine primitivism than a modern vision of reality—interpreted with all its limitations and grandeur but always deeply imbued with the colors of the artist’s creativity.

¹ Donato Coppola, Il Riparo di Agnano Nel Paleolitico Superiore. La sepoltura Ostuni 1 ed i suoi simboli, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, 2012, p. 137.