Among the participants in the Michetti Art Prize, currently taking place in Francavilla al Mare (CH), is the Bolognese artist Andrea Benetti, invited to compete in the “Art and Environment” section with his Neo-Cave paintings.
The exhibition, set up at the Michetti Museum under the title “Italian Diorama – Art and Environment”, curated by Carlo Fabrizio Carli, offers a reflection on traditional themes such as landscape and the recovery of ancient cultural roots. However, it does so through a vision projected towards the future, one that necessarily takes into account issues such as sustainability and ecology.
Benetti, born in 1964, contributes to shaping this sensitivity with his works, created using natural elements such as coffee, cocoa, hibiscus, and henna, which blend on the canvas with oils and acrylics. The result is a constellation of signs, geometric and stylized forms, graphic marks, and patches of color, where symbolic figures of our world (an airplane, a car, ships) barely emerge, alongside stars and stylized human figures that seem to belong to an archaic culture. It is precisely the paintings left behind by primitive humans—such as those found in the Altamira cave—that serve as the starting point for Benetti in defining his Neorupestrian Art, a concept he theorized in a manifesto presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
“We must start again from the dawn of humanity and from primordial art to rebuild a new world, where respect for nature and human dignity is finally placed at the center of mankind’s will,” writes Benetti.
“Only in this way will we reaffirm the sacredness of life, now lost in exchange for a short-sighted and empty way of living, which is leading the Earth to self-destruction.
Let us recreate the conditions to envelop the world in love and peace.”