In the presentation text for a previous exhibition (Colors and Sounds of the Origins, 2013), I had the opportunity to discuss the graphic simplifications of the images that animate Andrea Benetti’s “Neo-Rupestrian” canvases, highlighting how his works oscillate between an archaic past—imploding into the expressivity of primitive man—and a hyper-technological future. His stylized patterns of cars, airplanes, and scooters merge with the silhouettes of horses, buffalo, and hominids, transforming into symbols, heraldic models of a world seen through a synthesizing lens, where the dominant feature is the outline, used to circumscribe the various icons.
Benetti does not shy away from employing stencils or masking techniques—currently widespread among contemporary artists—methods that offer a rapid and cost-effective way to express the communicative and expressive essence of images, stripped of excessive realistic and descriptive burdens, akin to the current visual language of computer graphics. However, in the case of the series of eighteen canvases Study on Petroglyphs, created for this exhibition, Benetti takes a further step backward, regressing to the stylistic features of monochrome and rugged rock engravings adopted by the ancient Camuni, in order to reinterpret the expressive potential of incised lines and marks in a contemporary key.
The elimination of chromatic application—so successfully employed in many of his previous works—in favor of white monochrome allows light itself to become color, stimulating the engraved surfaces and imparting to the icons an aseptic and, at times, immaterial plasticity. As a result, these forms come to life through infinite luminous nuances of white and gray, in a combinatory play of matte and glossy surfaces, flat fields, and reliefs. The atmosphere becomes mysterious, almost mystical, in a sort of revisitation of the Homo sapiens’ cave, updated for the present: an environment where the works on the walls—designed to interact with the space—are paired with the imposing technological apparatus set up for the opening performance.
At the console tables, the figures and symbols drawn by Benetti on a work surface and filmed live will be animated in real-time within the INSTANT FILM project by Basmati Film, projected onto the ceiling of the room alongside the live sound performance by Frank Nemola, creating an atmosphere akin to a true synesthetic technological cave. Nemola’s prerecorded cold electronic sounds will alternate with urgent rhythmic sequences, the warm and ancestral sound of his trumpet, and his vocalizations, while, through Basmati’s live animation, the subjects of the incised paintings will appear to detach from the walls, floating freely and dematerializing into luminous pixels on the ceiling. The audience will thus find itself immersed in an integrated audio-video-performative environment, directly engaged in an action that, through a short-circuit between past and present, will fuse “visual space” and “acoustic space” into a single entity, transforming the exhibition hall into a truly dynamic and interactive dimension.