“Primal Abstractism” in the works of Andrea Benetti is on display at the Castle of Charles V in Lecce: today at 6:30 PM marks the opening of the solo exhibition of the Bolognese artist. His artistic language, as curator Toti Carpentieri notes in the catalog, is “composed of forms and images (both allusive and illusory), extra-dimensional, with sharp contours and a flat chromatic application.”
This exhibition serves as a deeper exploration of that “primal abstractism” which has long characterized and defined the artist’s work. A wanderer and nomad by both vocation and choice, Benetti moves far beyond any easily readable reference to those primitive gestures whose traces remain visible on the rocks of the Cave of Altamira and even, in Salento, on the walls of the Grotta del Cervo in Badisco. Playing with the relationship between image and abstract meaning, Benetti constructs a sum of figurative elements that are immediate—even in their chromatic elaboration.
One encounters small human figures, five- and six-pointed stars, hearts, squares, circles, female silhouettes, everyday objects, rectangles, crescents, zigzags, triangles, puffs, flourishes, stylistic motifs, sails, octagons, and animals—visual and emotional manifestations that should be understood as new landscapes of the everyday. His technique, above all, is evident: “a return to operational modes that are memorized and memorizable, aimed at constructing homogeneous and essential narrative surfaces.”
Benetti’s creative research does not overlook the influence of digital television and the internet—technologies that, through widely used tools such as tablets, smartphones, and computers, construct a form of reality, or at least its illusion, engaging two senses that act as receptors of images and sounds: sight and hearing. In this framework, time, as the curator concludes, “becomes both an approach to memory and a rhythmic unit that explains its dialogue, in other places and other moments, with music—through timbres and frequencies. Ultimately, even the surface of the artwork itself should be read as an interval, a measure, a segment of a complex expressive capacity that has risen to the status of a legitimized method.”