A long time ago, at the beginning of the last century, there was a small group of artists who, while staying in Paris, reshaped Western art by rediscovering its roots and revolutionary impulses—even within primitive African art. Picasso, Modigliani, and their friends. A great moment in art history, yet they had forgotten the flavors, the scents of that art. Attempting to understand it without grasping its “quinque-sensorial” values and limiting themselves to the visible was quite reductive.
Andrea Benetti, a solemn European, has brought his nose, taste buds, and artistic sensibility into the equation. Benetti, a native of the Po Valley, embodies the best qualities of Europe—a small continent, yet capable of absorbing, experiencing, and elaborating the world, retelling it, even with great irony.
Benetti approaches art playfully and without hesitation, unconcerned with how long time has existed or what it has dictated, and… he makes cakes! A wall-based pastry chef, meticulously layering extreme mixtures of coffee and cocoa with vinyl onto canvas, he tells a story—not as a graffiti artist, but as a true cave painter. He reminds us that the greatest marvel is not hunting the bison but recreating one using chocolate molds… A contemporary primitive, a pastry chef, a master of art, a smiling presence in a back-and-forth of solemn bunglers.