For Benetti, the new for the sake of the new holds no interest. His is a profound exploration of the sensitivity of the human soul—painting, photography, and music interact and interpenetrate in an integrated form of art, a legacy of the paths he has traveled in his life.
This is the reality of today: formal painting, that is, easel painting, increasingly draws breath from a multisensory and interactive interpretation. The roads leading to stylistic perfection—not to beauty, mind you, as beauty is an extremely personal concept—must be sought in everything that brings us to harmony. As Benedetto Croce teaches us, harmony is codified and therefore the same for everyone; beauty is not, and it does not concern us. After all, what is beauty? Is Modigliani’s Lunja beautiful? No, but it is an icon of perfection and love. And Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon? Or Matisse’s La Danse? What are they, if not perfection? What are they, if not a cry of joy for having found the way?
Andrea Benetti embodies all of this—a continuous search, without excuses or imitations. Andrea Benetti is only himself. In a world that has become egocentric and difficult to interpret, he seeks his own inner self in a deeply personal way, following the fil rouge, never straying from his ethical interiority. Formally a purist, he embarks on the path of artistic awareness toward that place where intuition and imagination reign supreme.
Every man follows his own utopia, chases it, sometimes finds it—it is the utopia of perfection, the utopia of creation. Man aspires to divinity because he is a creator, a creator of images and sensations. This is why he becomes an artist, why this silent and at times esoteric world grants him a faculty otherwise impossible: creation. Here, man becomes God—or at least, comes close to him.
A man above all others: the great Michelangelo, who did not paint men, forms, or volumes—he painted the ancestral, the otherworldly, perfection. Today, it is increasingly rare to come across men and women who have the courage to travel the windy and steep road of art. Déjà vu is omnipresent, but every so often, it happens—these are rare pearls, often unique, who live in the shadows and often in solitude, just to succeed in climbing that road.
And yet, they still exist—thank heaven. In their silence, they explore and live. They still exist. Andrea is one of them. This is why he is a precious individual, an honest man who never cheats at the game of art. This is why museums are beginning to seek him out and collect his work.