The Basmati duo (composed of Audrey Coïaniz and Saul Saguatti) has often captured or photographed the architecture of Italian cities, deconstructing and fragmenting them into a multiplicity of viewpoints, highlighting their structural profiles through trajectories and movement vectors—those force-lines with which the Futurists, and Boccioni above all, painted incredible and dazzling “simultaneous visions.” Basmati’s is truly a “rising city,” where buildings and monuments are centrifuged in the gleaming mixer of video, where the rhythm of animation becomes pure flow.
But stepping away for a moment from the metropolitan jungle with its dizzying rhythms, the Basmati duo has now ventured into the discovery of the real jungle, where the natural elements dominate, and the human imprint is minimal, non-invasive. These are the signs of a new cave painting, that of Andrea Benetti, dancing to the call of an obsessive drumbeat—the jungle percussion of Frank Nemola. Indeed, Benetti’s slender and elongated figures constitute the iconographic repertoire from which the Basmati duo embarked on a journey beyond the barriers of space and time. Essentia is like an acceleration into the past and a “return to the future”; it is the synthesis of a material-based investigation into the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire—within the vibrant quadrilateral of video.
For Audrey Coïaniz and Saul Saguatti, matter in its various states—liquid, solid, or gaseous—is the living substance of a new or rediscovered Informality: excrescences, clots, germinations, and bubbling processes form the grammar of many of their live performances, where the two artists experiment with alchemical mixtures and blends, projecting them onto walls and giant screens, testing the mutability of organic forms and channeling them in real-time to immerse the environment in a new light—the light of pixels.
Through this kind of “technological Informalism,” the viewer is introduced to a microcosm of peduncles, gametes, amoebas, and molecules that magnify, transitioning from the infinitely small to the infinitely large thanks to the flexibility and dimensional adaptability of a highly contemporary medium. Gesture and matter thus exist and unfold in the heterotopia or atopia of the video environment, where the signs of an elementary iconism float, disperse, and defy gravity, expanding into convolutions, vortices, and spirals—just as they did on the canvases of the Nuclearists.
But on the material frames of Essentia, forming idyllic, desert-like, and fiery territories, hunting scenes appear—like those of the Camuni—though filtered through a playful linearism, almost comic-like, with a pop-art flavor. This is the neo-rupestrian imagery of Andrea Benetti, engaging in a singular dialogue with those painters of the previous generation who advocated a return to a “wild” form of painting, such as Markus Lüpertz and A. R. Penck. However, Benetti takes a further step: he lightens the tones with pastels, blending them with henna and coffee, but above all, he softens the contours and stitches them together in a sinuous cloisonné, joyfully associating primitive symbols with childlike ones, thus condensing the two paths of a revitalizing regression—to avoid succumbing to what Jean Dubuffet called an “asphyxiating culture.”
Returning to the origins, in fact, means rediscovering dormant energies that a relationship with primordial elements can stimulate and awaken—but only if mediated through the forms, languages, and techniques of today, to foster a more intense and nourishing connection with the world.