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2011
Arts-Up
Interview avec Manfredi Beninati
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
- Qu’est-ce qui vous fait lever le matin ? Le besoin de me faire un café ( Il voler farmi un caffè )
- Que sont devenus vos rêves d’enfant ? Ils ont grandi avec moi ( Sono cresciuti con me )
- A quoi avez-vous renoncé ? A la mortalité sereine ( Alla serena mortalità )
- D’où venez-vous ? D’un instant d’idiotie de mes parents ( Da un momento d'idiozia dei miei genitori )
- A qui n’avez-vous jamais osé écrire ? A moi, je m’épouvanterais ( A me stesso. Mi spaventerei )
- Qu’est-ce qui vous distingue des autres artistes ? La concentration ( La concentrazione )
- A quoi avez-vous renoncé pour votre travail ? La mer ( Il mare )
- Où et comment travaillez-vous ? Dans mon monde, continuellement sans pauses. Même la nuit, même quand je dors ( Nel mio mondo, continuativamente, senza pausa. Anche di notte, anche dormendo )
- Quelle musique écoutez-vous en travaillant ? Le bruit des mes souliers, des outils que j’utilise, de ma respiration devenue l’halètement d’un fumeur invétéré ( Il rumore delle mie scarpe, degli sttrezzi che sto utilizzando, del mio respiro affannato da fumatore incallito )
- Quel livre aimeriez vous relire ? Le Baron Perché d’Italo Calvino ( Il barone rampante di Calvino )
- Quels sont les livres qui vous font pleurer ? Ceux qui décrivent le monde comme un lieu où peut exister la fraternité ( Quelli che descrivono il mondo come un posto dove esiste fratellanza )
- Lorsque vous vous regardez dans votre miroir qui voyez-vous ? Moi même, chaque fois plus vieux. Ce serait très bien de pouvoir continuer à le faire longtemps encore ( Me stesso ogni volta più vecchio. Sarebbe Molto bello poter continuare a farlo per molto tempo ancora )
- Quels sont les travaux ménagers qui vous rebutent le plus ? Repasser, je crois. Je n’en suis pas sûr car je ne l’ai jamais fait. Mes vêtements ne sont jamais repassés ( Stirare, credo. Non ne sono sicuro poichè non l'ho mai fatto. I miei indumenti non sono mai stirati )
- De quels artistes vous sentez-vous proche ? De ceux qui se tiennent aussi loin que possible des autres artistes. Je pense la même chose qu'eux ( Quelli che stanno alla larga dagli altri artisti. La penso come loro )
- Qu’aimeriez-vous recevoir pour votre anniversaire ? La promesse que personne me téléphone jusqu’à mon prochain anniversaire ( La promessa che nessuno mi telefoni fino al prossimo compleanno )
- Que défendez-vous ? Le droit d’être le fruit de ma propre pensée pas endoctrinée. Je suis un utopiste, je m’en rends compte ( Il diritto ad esser il frutto del proprio pensiero non indottrinato. sono un utopista, me ne rendo conto )
- Que vous inspire la phrase de Lacan : "L'Amour c'est donner quelque chose qu'on n'a pas à quelqu'un qui n'en veut pas"? A Ponce Pilate. Cela me paraît très pratique! ( A Ponzio Pilato. Mi pare molto conveniente! )
- Enfin que pensez-vous de celle de W. Allen : "La réponse est oui mais quelle était la question ?" Que W. Allen ne doit pas être très intelligent. Je trouve aucune stimulation dans ce mot d’esprit à deux sous (Che W. Allen non dev'essere molto intelligente. Non trovo alcuno stimolo in queste freddure da quattro soldi )
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20112011
Arts-Up
Interview avec Manfredi Beninati
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
- Qu’est-ce qui vous fait lever le matin ? Le besoin de me faire un café ( Il voler farmi un caffè )
- Que sont devenus vos rêves d’enfant ? Ils ont grandi avec moi ( Sono cresciuti con me )
- A quoi avez-vous renoncé ? A la mortalité sereine ( Alla serena mortalità )
- D’où venez-vous ? D’un instant d’idiotie de mes parents ( Da un momento d'idiozia dei miei genitori )
- A qui n’avez-vous jamais osé écrire ? A moi, je m’épouvanterais ( A me stesso. Mi spaventerei )
- Qu’est-ce qui vous distingue des autres artistes ? La concentration ( La concentrazione )
- A quoi avez-vous renoncé pour votre travail ? La mer ( Il mare )
- Où et comment travaillez-vous ? Dans mon monde, continuellement sans pauses. Même la nuit, même quand je dors ( Nel mio mondo, continuativamente, senza pausa. Anche di notte, anche dormendo )
- Quelle musique écoutez-vous en travaillant ? Le bruit des mes souliers, des outils que j’utilise, de ma respiration devenue l’halètement d’un fumeur invétéré ( Il rumore delle mie scarpe, degli sttrezzi che sto utilizzando, del mio respiro affannato da fumatore incallito )
- Quel livre aimeriez vous relire ? Le Baron Perché d’Italo Calvino ( Il barone rampante di Calvino )
- Quels sont les livres qui vous font pleurer ? Ceux qui décrivent le monde comme un lieu où peut exister la fraternité ( Quelli che descrivono il mondo come un posto dove esiste fratellanza )
- Lorsque vous vous regardez dans votre miroir qui voyez-vous ? Moi même, chaque fois plus vieux. Ce serait très bien de pouvoir continuer à le faire longtemps encore ( Me stesso ogni volta più vecchio. Sarebbe Molto bello poter continuare a farlo per molto tempo ancora )
- Quels sont les travaux ménagers qui vous rebutent le plus ? Repasser, je crois. Je n’en suis pas sûr car je ne l’ai jamais fait. Mes vêtements ne sont jamais repassés ( Stirare, credo. Non ne sono sicuro poichè non l'ho mai fatto. I miei indumenti non sono mai stirati )
- De quels artistes vous sentez-vous proche ? De ceux qui se tiennent aussi loin que possible des autres artistes. Je pense la même chose qu'eux ( Quelli che stanno alla larga dagli altri artisti. La penso come loro )
- Qu’aimeriez-vous recevoir pour votre anniversaire ? La promesse que personne me téléphone jusqu’à mon prochain anniversaire ( La promessa che nessuno mi telefoni fino al prossimo compleanno )
- Que défendez-vous ? Le droit d’être le fruit de ma propre pensée pas endoctrinée. Je suis un utopiste, je m’en rends compte ( Il diritto ad esser il frutto del proprio pensiero non indottrinato. sono un utopista, me ne rendo conto )
- Que vous inspire la phrase de Lacan : "L'Amour c'est donner quelque chose qu'on n'a pas à quelqu'un qui n'en veut pas"? A Ponce Pilate. Cela me paraît très pratique! ( A Ponzio Pilato. Mi pare molto conveniente! )
- Enfin que pensez-vous de celle de W. Allen : "La réponse est oui mais quelle était la question ?" Que W. Allen ne doit pas être très intelligent. Je trouve aucune stimulation dans ce mot d’esprit à deux sous (Che W. Allen non dev'essere molto intelligente. Non trovo alcuno stimolo in queste freddure da quattro soldi )
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Tribe Art
Intervista con Manfredi Beninati
di G. G. Blando
Un mondo che si rivela con la luminescenza e la magia di immagini svelate da una lanterna magica, cosi appaiono le visioni di Manfredi Beninati, artista palermitano, poeta di una realtà scoperta attraverso il filtro della memoria, con il senso del trascorrere del tempo, del fluire sedimentato della percezione, mediato dal filtro della coscienza, dalla sovrapposizione delle interpretazioni, dagli inganni della mente. Non si dimenticano le sensazioni e il vissuto interiore convive e si sviluppa con l ‘essere che cresce e si trasforma ed è questa coscienza dilatata nel tempo che rende ancora più sensibile il presente. L’infanzia è un frammento sbiadido e le stanze della memoria ritornano a vivere come luoghi dell’anima, come se il momento possa essere “durata interiore”, secondo la filosofia di Bergson, come un passato che vive ancora. Il disordine che nasce da un’accumulazione di oggetti, si stempera attraverso l’evanescenza pittorica che assegna alle cose il fascino della consunzione determinata dal tempo con il suo inesorabile trascorrere. Le installazioni ricreano ambienti che sembrano familiari, guardati attraverso uno spazio visivo, delimitato, assicurando una distanza di sicurezza dalla rassegnazione che nonostante si sia vissuto il tempo avuto a disposizione, qualcosa sia stato perso. Manfredi Beninati, vive tra Palermo, Roma e Los Angeles, ha partecipato a importanti rassegne internazionali, come la Biennale di Venezia, e il suo lavoro è molto apprezzato da curatori e collezionisti che operano nel sistema dell’arte. Ama intendere il mestiere dell’artista come un lavoro che scaturisce dalla tecnica e dalla sapienza compositiva, ama l’arte e la cultura italiana ed è affascinato dalla scultura di Medardo Rosso, riuscendo a creare sfumature, vibrazioni che avvicinano la materia alla memoria e alla psiche con le sue derivazioni inconsce, assecondando il fluire mobile di una consapevolezza che emerge dal buio di un tempo trascorso. «Cosa sarebbe il mondo senza l’amore» scriveva Goethe ne I dolori del giovane Werther «se non una lanterna magica senza la luce?».
.......
GGB: Nelle tue opere visioni interiori si traducono nella rappresentazione di una dimensione psichica. Concentrandoti sulla sensibilitˆ dei bambini
e degli adolescenti, racconti un viaggio nella memoria emotiva, descrivendo un ' atmosfera di purezza che sembra perduta. Cosa ti sollecita a
considerare queste tematiche?
MB: Non direi che il mio lavoro artistico tratti il tema della memoria o che rappresenti delle visioni interiori né, tantomeno, ho mai avuto un interesse
particolarmente sviluppato nei confronti dell'immaginario infantile. Piuttosto sono sempre stato interessato alla composizione, tanto nei miei quadri
e disegni quanto nelle mie installazione. Ed e' sull'equilibrio strutturale d'un opera, sul versante compositivo, appunto, che ho sempre lavorato. Poi,
ovviamente,
un osservatore estraneo trae tante altre conclusioni, e puo' anche accadere che rimanga piu' affascinato dalle atmosfere, dal lato oscuro della mia
psiche che, certamente, dovra' trasparire. Non avendo avuto una educazione accademica della storia dell'arte, la poca cultura che ne ho deriva più che
altro dalla
mia curiosita', dall'essermi perso, in gioventù, tra le riproduzioni nei libri di arte che trovavo a casa e di cui quasi mai leggevo i testi. Queste
intere giornate trascorse così, sfogliando quei libri costituiscono uno dei ricordi a cui continuo ad essere piu affezionato. Lì
e' nato il mio amore per certa pittura (rinascimentale, barocca e novecentesca) che, senza dubbio, ha formato il mio immaginario personale. Nient'altro
da allora m'ha appassionato tanto profondamente.
GGB: La memoria affettiva rimanda agli affetti familiari, alla casa e alla famiglia, elementi che contribuiscono alla costruzione di un vissuto interiore.
Il luogo della tua infanzia, per la storia familiare è Palermo. Quali ricordi ti legano a questa città? Quali colori e forme di Palermo ti sono rimaste
impresse?
MB: Tutti i miei colori e le mie forme derivano dai ricordi che porto dentro di me, ovviamente. Palermo mi rifornisce di contnui ricordi che vanno via via
ritornando a galla anche con contorni estremamente sfumati. E' una fonte inesauribile di prestesti, di appigli ed anche di soluzioni.
GGB: Hai studiato presso il centro sperimentale di fotografia di Roma ed il cinema una tua grande passione. Quanto contribuisce la tua cultura
cinematografica alla realizzazione delle tue opere, in particolare alle scenografiche installazioni?
MB: Molto profondamente.
GGB: Da qualche anno vivi negli Stati Uniti d' America, a Los Angeles, con la tua compagna e tuo figlio, il piccolo Leone. Credi che il sistema
dell'arte americano sia differente rispetto al sistema italiano?
MB: In realtà vivo più a Palermo ed a Roma che a Los Angeles. Il mondo anglosassone lo conosco molto bene comunque (ho vissuto in
inghilterra per quasi tutti gli anni novanta) e so per certo che il loro sistema è sempre diverso dal nostro e nella maggior parte dei casi è più
efficace perchè meglio strutturato, in qualsiasi ambito, anche in quello dell'arte contemporanea, dove, infatti loro (americani o inglesi) godono di
enorme visibilità sulla scena planetaria mentre noi italiani vivacchiamo, sopravviviamo, diciamo così. In questo campo loro hanno le istituzioni, gli
investimenti, il controllo dell'informazione, gli organi di divulgazione, il sistema con la esse maiuscola che appoggia e spinge il lavoro dei migliori
talenti. Noi dobbiamo ringraziare il cielo d'avere quei quattro musei che abbiamo e che ogni tanto danno un pò di spazio anche ai giovani artisti italiani,
dato l'evidente, totale disinteresse da parte delle istituzioni pubbliche e private nei confronti dellaproduzione artistica nostrana e comunque la pochezza
intellettuale e l'assoluta mancanza di coraggio che mettono in campo i nostri critici, storici e curatori.
GGB: Come sono considerati gli artisti italiani negli Stati Uniti d'America?
MB: Non saprei rispondere a questa domanda se non evidenziando che se ne vedono davvero pochissimi in giro soprattutto nelle programmazioni delle istituzioni
più prestigiose dove sono quasi del tutto assenti. E non mi sto riferendo soltanto alle giovani leve ma anche agli artisti più importanti e storicizzati
come Piero Manzoni o Gino De Dominicis. Per non parlare del povero grande Medardo Rosso! Questo poco interesse è colpa delle nostre istituzioni, appunto.
GGB: Hai vissuto negli ultimi dieci anni un ' intensa stagione creativa, esponendo sia negli Stati Uniti che in Europa, ed hai partecipato ad importanti
manifestazioni artistiche come la Biennale di Venezia. Le tue opere sono richieste dai collezionisti, ma proprio adesso che il tuo successo è riconosciuto,
hai deciso di dare un vero colpo di scena, abbandonando l' arte figurativa ed interrompendo l'attivitˆ espositiva, potresti spiegare a tutti gli appassionati
d'arte contemporanea siciliani i motivi della tua scelta?
MB: Semplicemente perchè il mondo dell'arte non mi coinvolge più. Non riesco più a prenderlo sul serio. Trovo che sia troppo autoreferenziale e, peggio ancora,
autocelebrativo, sia a livello di produzione che di sistema, cioè di tutto ciò che gira attorno alla produzione d'un artista, galleristi, critici, curatori,
collezionisti. Ho sempre inteso che fosse un grande gioco di società sin dall'inizio, ma, mentre prima quasi mi divertiva farne parte oggi non ci trovo più
nulla di creativo. E poi non ritengo che ci siano i presupposti di meritocrazia che a mio parere sarebbero necessari per dare un senso compiuto a tutto ciò
che avviene in questo sistema. Credo (anzi lo so per certo) che le persone con una coscienza storica, filologica ed una visione chiara ed onesta di quello
che si sta facendo oggi sono davvero poche e di queste pochissime svolgono un ruolo d'un certo rilievo.
Ciononostante l'arte, il fruirne ed il farla, è una parte fondante della persona che sono oggi e, credo, domani e per sempre. Non credo che potrò mai fare
a meno del silenzio e dei rumori del mio studio né, tantomeno, della meraviglia che ti suscita dentro il dar forma ad un'idea o ad una sensazione.
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2011
THE WHITE REVIEW
Interview with Manfredi Beninati - by Lowenna Waters
TIME, MEMORY, THE LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND, MANIFESTATION AND METAMORPHOSIS, RESURGENCE AND COLLAPSE AND THE CRISP CRUST OF SICILIAN PASTRY: ALL ELEMENTS OF THE PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, SCULPTURES AND INSTALLATIONS OF MANFREDI BENINATI.
Based in Palermo, Manfredi started working as a contemporary artist in 2000 after a three year stint as a film director’s assistant. He has fostered a love for cinematography since his youth, when he often missed school after staying up all night to watch films.
In 2005 he represented Italy at the 51st Venice Biennale, at which he was awarded the audience prize. His 'Diecembre 2039' exhibition at the Max Wigram gallery presented a series of large-scale drawings of his close family: his mother, his girlfriend, his son and his brother, who has since passed away. Accompanying sculptures picked out and developed motifs from the drawings.
There is in Beninati’s work a manifest tension between serenity and anxiety. The works have an emotional power which harks back to the landscape of memory that links our childhood, adolescence and present.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — You have described the process of working on thirty to forty drawings at a time as ‘an organisation of the imagination’?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — To me art is about sharing your personal experiences with the rest of the world. Therefore the difference between a good (significant) artist and a bad (insignificant) one derives from the quantity of yourself you let into your work. Personal experiences translate into memories resulting from a period of time during which you have learnt something that allows you to discern them in a more sophisticated way than before. The same applies to a work of art. You need time to develop something not necessarily pleasing to others but strongly personal. Something that even just in a single detail shows a hidden spot of our reality through the imposition of your point of view, through trying not to let the other's expectations influence your work. I think you need to spend time with your work and develop a narrative, and that's why I'm constantly working on so many drawings, paintings, sculptures. I keep each one with me for months or even years.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — There is a restless emotional dichotomy in your work – a tension between serenity and anxiety. Is it something to do with your interest in being as objective as possible?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — Exactly... in life we experience good things and bad things. They are all necessary events in the making of ourselves, so we should treat both, goodness and badness (or serenity and anxiety) with the same amount of care and respect. Maybe one day we will wake up to find out that the roles have inverted, that good is bad and vice versa. That's always possible.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your work is often described as having a fragmented narrative; does this have anything to do with your passion for cinematography?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — I'd rather say that my passion for narration makes me passionate about cinema and art, as well as any other medium that allows you to tell a story. In my art it is true that there are always lots of fragments that, if you want, you can piece together following your own sense of narrative and make up your own story, your own film, if you prefer. This is more evident in my installations, which are always conceived as if they were film stills in three dimensions, depicting a moment when all the human characters have left the scene, and you can decide what's happened a second before and what will happen a second after you have left.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you have any comments on the Venice Biennale; its place in contemporary culture, your contribution to the 2005 event and the upcoming biennale?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — When I became an artist in 2000 I didn't know much about the contemporary art world, beyond MOMA, the Tate and the Venice Biennale. Those were my only three reference points. To the 2009 Biennale I sent a fresco portraying F. T. Marinetti playing noise on the intonarumori (an instrument designed by the author of The Art of Noise, Russolo) that I made in Los Angeles (my son Leone was born there a couple of weeks before). I could tell you a lot about my first Venice Biennale, the 2005 one, where I made my first installation 'To take notes for a dream that begins in the afternoon and continues through the night (and is not cancelled out on awakening) or Waking up on a beach in the scorching sun.']. It was a cinematographic set made by professional set carpenters at Cinecittà in Rome. It was a great experience.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you think contemporary artists have any moral duty to civil society?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — This is a recurring question in my interviews, so I can answer it by memory: yes they play a very important role in society. Their role is opposed to philosophies. Art reveals mysteries concerning us as individuals and society, whilst philosophy explains why they are there. The moment that an artist turns philosopher (which happens often) then things don't work anymore. André Bazin influential French film theorist] once said that cinema is anything between Hitchcock and Antonioni. I would quote him saying that society is anything between Art (any form of art) and Philosophy (symbolizing knowledge, rationality).
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Are the concepts of truth and beauty interesting to you?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — Actually, not at all. Unless by beauty you mean balance, in which case I would reply, maybe. And... Unless you mean realism by truth, in which case I would say... certainly yes. The two issues come together for me. My own balance is the fulcrum of my work and is obtained partly by juxtaposing realism and blurred, undefined, incongruous elements.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — I have read you compiled a catalogue of artists who you have learnt from and who have influenced your work. Who is in it?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — Have I? I don't remember doing it but I can satisfy your curiosity anyway. Here are the first ten to come to mind: Marco Ferreri, Ermanno Olmi, Franco Piavoli, Andrej Tarkovskij, Medardo Rosso, Piero della Francesca, Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Serpotta, Gaetano Zumbo, Homer.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Folkloristic, poetic amalgamations of images are formed in your drawings and paintings; do you have any comments on these themes?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — They represent my personal imagery, I guess. They just appear in my works without being invited. You know how it is when you are working in your studio completely absorbed in your world. Things sometimes just happen by themselves. Sometimes you even have to fight against disorder, and that takes a lot of energy to control, to try clear the work of the junk that keeps accumulating. That's what happens in my studio, at least.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — The series of drawings and sculptures I saw exhibited at the Max Wigram Gallery in the exhibition Dicembre 2039 each focused around a specific protagonist; your mother, your girlfriend, your late brother. Can you tell us about this show?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — The drawings in that show were made over a period of seven years, the sculptures over a couple of months. I made the first of those drawings back in 2003-2004 and was intending it to be part of my private family album along with another ten or so drawings, each one depicting the private, inner world of my closest family. This body of work was not conceived to be shown in public but to remain part of my private collection of my own works. It all started when I moved to a very big studio in Rome where the vastness of the space enticed me to make what I had been doing up to then drawings] in a much larger scale. In 2004 one of them ended up being shown at an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London where it remained after a gallerist sold it to an English collector without asking me first, so that my project was left severed from the piece that started it, titled 'Flavio and Palermo' and dedicated to my brother who passed away in 2006. I eventually decided to do the Dicembre 2039 exhibition just too re-unite Flavio with the other members of his family. My wife (who never met him) is there with our son Leone.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — In an interview conducted for UOVO magazine in 2007, when asked about emotional themes in your work, you said ‘I hate good people.’ Could you elaborate?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — That interview was formulated in Italian and then translated into English, so it could be either a case of misinterpretation or incorrect translation or just me lying, which is something I do a lot, especially in interviews where I make up stories that, of course, get taken seriously by the interviewer. I believe that an artist should only tell his truth through his work, although I love talking to people in words. It is also true that I tend not to trust "nice" people, anyway.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — From your work I've learned things about your life and those of other people. Would you say that art is, and is about, people?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — Art is about us humans, of course. We invented it, didn't we?
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your works present the internal connection that links us to our childhood, adolescence and the transient present: do you think these memories constitute an individual?
AMANFREDI BENINATI — Indeed they do. I think our whole adult lives revolve around our childhoods. We are all looking for the flavours and smells of the time when we were innocent.
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2011
ESFERA CRITICA
"El arte nos revela misterios, la filosofía trata luego de explicárnoslos" -
Entrevista de Gema Melgar con Manfredi Beninati.
En declaraciones en su reciente inauguración de Dicembre 2039 dice "Desde los comienzos de mi carrera artística he hecho cosas para mí mismo, cuadros y esculturas que no tenía la intención de mostrar en ninguna parte..." Según tengo entendido, parte de estos cuadros 'privados' conforman esta exposición, ¿que le hizo cambiar de idea y mostrarlos?
El caso de esta exposición es bastante particular y la historia bastante larga. Empieza en el 2003 cuando hice el primer dibujo (lápiz y yeso / papel / panel de madera) de tamaño "muy" grande (260x300cm) que desde el principio iba a ser parte de una serie dedicada a mi familia. Lo que pasó entonces fue que mi galerista de Roma se lo dejó a un comisario para una exposición en la Royal Academy de Londres, sin que yo supiera nada... Este dibujo (Flavio y Palermo) nunca regresó a mi estudio (se lo compró Jay Joplin) y mi proyecto se quedó mutilado. Fue por esta razón que lo dejé más o menos ahí, hasta hace un par de años. Flavio era mi hermano, que murió en el 2006, y yo quería que se volviera a juntar con su familia. Hicimos esta muestra para que esto pasara. Como ves fue algo fuera de mi control y tuve que adaptarme a las circunstancias...
En su obra se intuye una lucha entre pasado, presente y futuro, creo que el tiempo está muy presente. Trae épocas pasadas al presente como con fruits from a nearby ocean o to think of something. Pero con Dicembre 2039 por primera vez sitúa su obra y al espectador en el futuro. ¿Por qué?
Claramente te refieres al título! En el 2039 Leone, mi hijo, tendrá 30 años, lo que yo considero la edad clave de la vida de una persona. Los dibujos en la muestra son el álbum fotográfico de su familia y, como pasa muchas veces a fotografías y películas que no se han guardado y tratado con cariño, las imágenes que le llegan están muy deterioradas. Es una cuestión de memoria. Imagínate que sería la vida sin memoria! Y una persona que no se acuerda de lo que hizo el día anterior y que cada día pierde (que se le olvida) todo el trabajo que había hecho el día anterior?
He leído que trabaja en 30 o 40 cuadros a la vez, y lo primero que se me ha venido a la cabeza es ¿durante que espacio de tiempo?
Muy largo, sin duda. Puede variar de un mes a tres años según la naturaleza del trabajo. En este momento, aquí en mi estudio hay un número impresionante de trabajos. Miro alrededor y veo esculturas empezadas hace cuatro años, dibujos empezados en el año 2000 o 2001 y pinturas nuevas que ya están casi terminadas al lado de otras viejas de hasta hace cinco años, que nunca termino.
Siguiendo con la pintura, en su técnica emplea raspado y dripping, y colores en tonos pastel mayoritariamente o también dibujos en blanco y negro. Esto me da la impresión que construye a propósito una imagen gastada, que no podemos ver bien o mejor dicho, que nos ofrece otra manera de ver.
Exactísimo. La pintura al oleo para mí es puro color. Deja que sea la contraposición de dos colores la que crea el espacio necesario para un volumen.
¿que le ofrece la pintura como medio para expresar lo que quiere narrar?
La cosa que más me excita de la pintura es el hecho de que, después de todo, sea la técnica reina de la historia del arte. Que siempre ha existido y que por los últimos seis siglos no ha cambiado nada. Esto hace que sea posible comparar artistas de épocas distintas de una forma muy clara y linear. Por lo tanto es más fácil leer la evolución de la sociedad humana a través de la pintura, como lo permiten la literatura y la música. El video-arte (que es incluso muchísimo más joven que el cine, que ya en sí es un medio expresivo bastante naïve debido a la falta de historia progresiva) no tiene término de comparación, es por esto que creo que es más un medio lúdico que artístico.
El tema de la infancia es recurrente en su obra, en cuadros e instalaciones hay signos que evocan la existencia de esa realidad infantil, juguetes, bicicletas de niños... pero, en el caso de las instalaciones, la figura desaparece. Esta ausencia (en particular de niños, pero en general de personas) siento que dota a la imagen de una sutil siniestralidad, un sentimiento desapacible, cercano a lo 'umheimlich' de Freud, pero que se nutre además de referencias del imaginario colectivo. ¿es esta su intención?
Más que nada creo que mi intención es encontrar una forma de reorganizar las cosas de la vida y del mundo que me rodea según un plan sin jerarquías y donde el orden de las cosas (objetos físicos y también inmateriales, como podría ser una emoción o un sentimiento) sea representado a través de un equilibrio precario que solo mantiene su forma si cada elemento respeta el espacio de los demás. Me doy cuenta que probablemente no estoy siendo bastante claro pero es que así es. Hablando de la ausencia de personas en las instalaciones, se debe al hecho de que lo que me interesa representar es la cristalización de un momento de la vida cotidiana de un ser humano, para que luego los espectadores puedan cada uno imaginarse su propia versión de la historia. Como si se tratara de una película de la que solo está disponible un frame y tú tienes que inventarte todo el resto. Aunque este frame está grabado en tres dimensiones, y la escena tiene que parecerte lo más realística y natural posible, no puede haber una presencia material de seres humanos, que, de hecho, acaban de salir de la escena para, después (tal vez) regresar.
En sus instalaciones el espectador, como voyeur, sólo puede mirar desde determinadas ventanas, puertas o agujeros, ¿por qué lo sitúa ahí? ¿es esta imposibilidad de entrar (a un escenario del pasado) una metáfora porque la única manera de revisitarlo es a través de imágenes?
En realidad, si puedes volver al pasado usando tu imaginación... Aunque haya hecho instalaciones donde el público tenía acceso, como tú bien dices, la mayoría de las veces no lo permito por varias razones. En principio es muy importante que se establezca una relación donde le quede claro al espectador que lo que tiene enfrente de sus ojos es una obra de arte. Y una ventana lo deja claro bastante rápido, enmarcando la escena como si fuera una pintura. Después, el cristal de la ventana siempre influye de alguna manera en la percepción óptica de lo que está detrás de él (reflejos, suciedad, etc). Y por último, te recuerda que tú no perteneces al mundo que estás mirando y que tampoco te pertenece. Lo que estás mirando es el pensamiento de otra persona, la idealización de la vida de otra persona que está siendo generosa al mostrarte sus dudas y sus certezas.
Me interesa la cuestión de la memoria selectiva en relación a la percepción visual, y creo que en su obra se puede ver en gran medida, también ligada a una tendencia fetichista. ¿por qué nos quedamos con unos recuerdos y otros no y por qué nos aferramos a ciertos objetos? . ¿Cómo concibe las imágenes que representa?
Creo firmemente que cada uno tendría que hablar de lo que mejor conoce, representar su propia experiencia y su propia vida de la forma más sincera posible. Todos los elementos representados en mis trabajos llegan directamente de mi pasado. Voy sacando recuerdos de mi álbum fotográfico imaginario y los voy devolviendo a la vida a través de mi trabajo. Sí, estoy de acuerdo, esto es todo muy fetichista...
Susan Sontag define una obra de arte como una manera de mostrar, de grabar o de ser testigo, la cual da forma palpable a la conciencia. ¿Cómo definiría usted al crítico de arte?
Estoy de acuerdo con Sontag. El arte es la conciencia de la sociedad humana. El arte nos muestra, nos revela misterios, lados desconocidos de nosotros, de la sociedad. La filosofía trata luego de explicárnoslos.
Sobre los críticos tengo un conflicto interior. No me puedo decidir. Es exactamente lo mismo que siento hacia los artistas. Hay buenos artistas y malos artistas así como hay buenos y malos críticos. Si un crítico de arte tiene conciencia filológica, histórica y sobre todo memoria universal, entonces se puede volver la clave de todo.
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2011
EXIBART
"Archive Fever"
Il curatore dell’Archivio Sacs, Giovanni Iovane, parla della nuova sede milanese di questa raccolta che ha come base il Museo Riso di Palermo. Un discorso sulla sua idea di Archivio e sulla sempre più rigogliosa arte siciliana...
....
Qualora fosse possibile, riuscirebbe a tracciare differenze o analogie tra gli artisti inseriti in archivio e artisti appartenenti ad altre realtà artistiche? A tal proposito mi vengono in mente centri culturali come Berlino, Londra, Milano…
Questa dei centri artistici è una tendenza nata circa venti anni fa quando, in paesi con situazioni economiche differenti rispetto all’Italia, caratterizzata da una economica abbastanza mediocre, si tendeva a creare un "marchio”. Questo orientamento ha provocato la nascita di "scuole” o gruppi di artisti accomunati da simili linguaggi o poetiche, vedi per esempio l’arte inglese o la scuola di Lipsia. A parere mio, queste sono solo etichette legate alle tendenze e alle mode del momento. In merito a ciò, mi viene in mente il lavoro di Manfredi Beninati (Palermo, 1970) nel quale riconosco un linguaggio estremamente pittorico, dal carattere internazionale, e migliore rispetto a quello di artisti appartenenti, per esempio, alla precedente citata Scuola di Lipsia.
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2011
IL GIORNALE DELL'ARTE
"Manfredi Beninati, le voci di dentro" - di Giusi Diana
Palermo. «Le voci di dentro» è il titolo della mostra di Manfredi Beninati ospitata in questi giorni presso la galleria Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea e visitabile fino all'11 di aprile.
Per questa sua seconda personale nella galleria palermitana, che si avvale della collaborazione di Raimundas Malasauskas, l'artista ha prodotto un'installazione ambientale che fin dal titolo, «Il 6 di agosto del 1975», traspone l'osservatore in un tempo sospeso, che è quello della memoria e del ricordo, facendolo riaffiorare lentamente, come in un sogno al risveglio. L'uso sapiente sulla «scena», perché di questo si tratta, di una luce ridotta al minimo e proveniente da due diverse fonti: l'una riscaldata dalla fiammella di una stufa e l'altra pura e aurorale proveniente dal riflesso di una finestra su uno specchio (a ben vedere, una lanterna magica che ci riporta all'archeologia del cinema, primo amore dell'artista), giocano con l'osservatore conducendolo per mano sulla soglia di un mondo onirico visto al chiaroscuro. L'interdizione a entrarvi completamente è però suggerita dalla presenza della quinta teatrale realizzata con vecchi mobili accatastati, costringendo ironicamente lo spettatore a rimanere tale. Affascina, come sempre nei suoi lavori installativi (vedi Biennale di Venezia del 2005), e convince il lavoro dell'artista di origini siciliane che con questa mostra ritorna nella sua città facendole un omaggio sussurrato, situandolo a metà tra l'elegante inchino e il grazioso sberleffo.
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2011
CASSAROUTE
"Manfredi Beninati, Le Voci di dentro alla Galleria Francesco Pantaleone"
di G. G. Blando
Una stanza arredata con mobili antichi, la specchiera della nonna rimasta intatta, la luce fioca e calda di un lampadario che riflette sul cristallo. Su di una scrivania rimane una vecchia macchina da scrivere, usata, che ha perso lo smalto del colore posseduto quando era stata acquistata. Fogli sparsi dovunque, accartocciati, i resti di un lavoro faticoso, le ore di lavoro sprecate per seguire le ambizioni e le fantasie di uno scrittore o di un giornalista. Cosi' si presenta l' installazione di Manfredi Beninati, “Le voci di dentro”, visitabile su appuntamento, presso la Galleria Francesco Pantaleone, fino al 11 Aprile 2011. L'installazione ricrea un ambiente interno, la stanza di un' abitazione privata e permette di soddisfare la curiosità di chi vuole guardare la vita degli altri. Sulla specchiera si riflette un paesaggio caldo, con i riflessi aurei del tramonto, le ombre delle piante in giardino, tutto sarebbe perfetto, se fosse vero, ma ci si rende presto conto di aver vissuto la magia di un' illusione, di essere stati trascinati in una dimensione spaziale del tutto costruita, come in un setting cinematografico. L' illusione rassicurante scompare, lasciando il posto alla finzione che smaschera quel dolce tepore magistralmente regalato al fruitore. L' atmosfera è crepuscolare, intima, i fiori sono finti, come falso è il bene prefigurato dagli arredi e gli oggetti che prefigurano un ambiente borghese, un lavoro intellettuale, il gusto della tradizione. L' installazione crea un'atmosfera ambigua. Tante piccole buone e belle cose lasciate e abbandonate , ma l' opera crea il desiderio di vivere realmente per contrasto quella dimensione privata fatta di certezza, sicurezza, sogno, in chi l' ha realmente vissuta o chi , invece, ne può avvertire per un momento l' incantesimo dell'illusione.Manfredi Beninati è nato a Palermo, la sua pittura si situa nella sfera dell' illusione del sogno turbato della infanzia, realizzando tele consunte dal tempo che trattengono il ricordo di una dolcezza scomparsa.
I colori perdono la consistenza , tutto si distrugge e perde l' iniziale freschezza, proponendo un senso della vanitas, quel senso di morte e di estinzione che logora l'esistenza, soffocando a stento le voci di dentro che ricordano e mantengono intatti oggetti e sentimenti ancora vivi nelle stanze dell ' interiorità.
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2010
RICH PEPPER
Work of the week: Manfredi Beninati
From Dicembre 2039, an exhibition of Manfredi Beninati's work at the Max Wigram gallery (now sadly finished), which featured five drawings of Beninati's perspective on the life of members of his family.
Untitled (Sunday 16 July 1975) 2010, © Manfredi Beninati, Pencil, acrylic gesso and pigments on Fabriano paper on wood (four panels), 300 x 260 cm
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2010
HAUS DIGITAL
Manfredi Beninati: Dicembre 2039 - by Lowenna Waters
Time, memory, the landscape of the mind, resurgence and collapse, manifestation and metamorphosis, dichotomy, childhood and the crisp crust of Sicilian pasty: all elements of the paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures made by the artist Manfredi Beninati.
Having been a representative of Italy in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2008, Beninati has always created works that are only for him, commenting how his “paintings and sculptures are not meant to be shown anywhere else.” He studied law but has always fostered an intense love for cinematography: consistently skipping school in his youth after staying up all night watching films. This cinematic set has been a consistent strand through his work, which first became internationally recognised in 2000, after a three year stint working as directors assistant. His work fosters a broken narrative, with folkloristic references placed within a poetic memory space. Mimetic in their distortion of time and space, there are kitsch cultural quotations placed within his grandmother’s large clean house with marble fireplaces.
The Max Wigram Gallery in Bond Street represents the artist, and is currently showing his latest body of work Diecembre 2039. The protagonists of these large scale pencil drawings are personal to Manfredi: his mother, his girlfriend, his brother who has since tragically passed away. They are subjective, intimate representations of each person’s life. Accompanying the drawings is a series of plaster sculptures that pick out motifs present in them, the sculptures melt within the plaster, spattered with pastel neon colours. They are reminiscent of Medardo Rosso, images roughly hewn from the stone in which they are made. Manfredi regularly works on 30 – 40 paintings at a time, describing the process as an organisation of his imagination.
The dichotomy present in Beninati’s work is manifest in the tension between serenity and calm and an undercurrent of anxiety. They have an emotional power, which harks back to something we can all relate to: the muffled, confused, dreamlike internal landscape of memory that links us to our childhood, adolescence and the transient present.
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2010
MODERN EDITION
Identity in transformation: Italian contemporary art
Identity and transformation: two themes which have always fascinated artists remain as salient as ever. Emphasis, for example, on socio-political transformation permeates Chinese and Eastern European art; preoccupation with the characteristics of past movements and their contemporary relevance continues to influence much German production.
It's tempting, however, to suggest that recent Italian art (we refer here to work produced by artists up to the age of 40) has opted for the most fundamental investigation of all: a questioning of the very nature of identity in its manifold forms, a labyrinthine undertaking that has given rise to equally fascinating works. ...
Smudged as if by rain, striations of colour partially obscure Manfredi Beninati's scenes plucked from memory or adaptations of grand classical themes such as the still-life or vanitas.
Various layers become a single visual plane, the stripes of obfuscation reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's vigourously smeared abstractions.
In one sense, Beninati's modus operandi seems an assault on the academic representation with which his works are initially created, a questioning of its validity, and power to adequately represent. Yet since his over-painting is only partial, the resulting abstract-figurative hybrid hints at a wider irresolution, a state of flux between opposing forms of facture.
This uncertainty is mirrored in his sculpture and installation. Forms in white plaster, their pristine surfaces evocative of classical statuary, are daubed and pigmented with candy colour. Elaborate installations are often inaccessible, viewable only through cracks in a wall or dark glass to become, essentially, flattened like a photograph.
Abstract or figurative? Sculptural or painterly? Three or two dimensional? Manfredi's completed works remain in a state of incompletion - or even, it could be said, over-completion - replete not only with pictorial suggestion, but a constant shifting between formal identities.
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2010
PRESS RELEASE MWG
Manfredi Beninati, Dicembre 2039, Press Release - by M. F. Kittler
I have since the very beginning of my artistic career been making things for myself, paintings and sculptures not meant to be shown anywhere else… Manfredi Beninati
Manfredi Beninati creates lands of fantasy reinventing rarefied, dreamlike experiences, exposing fragments of inner worlds, and exploring ideas of journey, memory, the struggles of life and the securities of childhood.
In Dicembre 2039, his most personal work to date, five large-scale drawings hauntingly portray members of Manfredi’s family; his mother, girlfriend, son, father and brother Flavio who has since tragically died. Each large-scale black and white drawing illuminates Beninati’s intimate perspective on the person’s life, whilst an accompanying sculpture evolves an element in the work - a chair, a tree, animals, a pastoral scene… Begun in 2003 as a long-term private project, the intricately detailed works draw inspiration from the family photo album and Beninati’s memories and experiences to reveal the subjects’ inner worlds and lives.
Manfredi Beninati began working as an artist making sculptures, figurative and still life paintings in 2000, drawing directly on real or imaginary childhood memories. His installations appear to be deserted sets, spaces that are often inaccessible, seen only through cracks or darkened glass soliciting a sort of voyeurism, and using art, film and literary references to great emotional effect.
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2010
CURA
Dicembre 2039
Manfredi Beninati si muove attraverso temi quali il ricordo, la fantasia e il viaggio, capaci di investire le sue opere di un’atmosfera rarefatta e sognante. Ed è questa sensazione a essere evocata anche dai lavori presenti nella mostra personale Dicembre 2039, alla Max Wigram Gallery di Londra.
L’esposizione, che raccoglie cinque grandi disegni in bianco e nero e una scultura, parte da un lavoro intimo e personale dell’artista iniziato nel 2003, che scava nel suo vissuto attraverso le immagini dei suoi parenti: la madre, il padre, la compagna, il figlio, il fratello morto tragicamente, emergono dal passato e dai ricordi come da un album fotografico.
1/4 Manfredi Beninati, Untitled (Sunday 16 July 1975), 2010, 300 x 260 cm, pencil, acrylic gesso, pigments on Fabriano paper on wood (four panels)
2/4 Manfredi Beninati, Untitled (Sunday 14 August 1981), 2010, 300 x 260 cm, pencil, acrylic gesso and pigments on Fabriano paper on wood (four panels)
3/4 Manfredi Beninati, Flavio e Palermo, 2004, 300 x 250 cm, pencil, acrylic gesso and pigments on Fabriano paper on wood (four panels)
4/4 Manfredi Beninati, Untitled, 2010, plaster, pva, pigments on wood and steel, 56 x 37 x 23.5 cm, plinth 110 x 37 x 23.5 cm
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2009
UPSTAIRS BERLIN
INTERVISTA DAL LIBRO "AUS KüNSTLERSICHT". 2009
Da "Aus Künstlersicht - 13 Fragen - 51 Interviews", di Aeneas Bastian e Harriet Häußler, Galerie Upstairs, Berlin
Questions to Manfredi Beninati from Dr. Bastian
1. What is art?
This is how I answered the first time somebody asked the same question. I just found it in my hard disc and tought it would be interesting to compare it with my new point of view (at that time I only had one or two years experience in the art world):
"Dear Mustafa’,
you asked me to write a few words on art (“my” art? Boh!) and, well, I have to say that I’m not too good at writing since painting and drawing is all I’'ve been up to lately, like most people in my business, I guess. I have to try and guess it because I don’t know that many artists and hardly spend time with the few ones I know and whenever I do we hardly talk about art. Art is, in fact such a private part of my life that I rather deal with it privately. It has been the fulcrum of my entire life since the day I discovered its healing power, since the day I found out that making it is even better than just watching it. You enjoy it twice as much than a passive spectator. And you learn more and want to push further and further. And it is all so thrilling because you never know where things could lead you to. There is a sentence that is probably the most frequently recurring sentence (nearly a stock phrase) in art history which is credited to different artists by different sources that says roughly: ‘at each touch I risk my life’. Well I used to regard it as a pathetically pompous statement (deriving from romantic ideals of struggling artists etc) and I still do partly, but partly don’t anymore. Because I now know that it is true that art (just like life) is mostly about taking risks that means opening oneself up and dealing with whatever is in it regardless of consequences. Then once you have done that, you wait and see what happens. Sometimes you get amazing things in return. Sometimes you can feel like you were time-travelling and you get transported back to your childhood or forward to the future that you will never get to see. And you are the same age in both cases. Sometimes my feet are very ticklish and my eyesight blured and I wonder how could Piero della Francesca long for what he longed for and why couldn’t he do things the opposite way. Sometimes I let a little flower mesmerize me for dozen and dozen of seconds sometimes for minutes and minutes and that’s even more beautiful than getting lost in a beautiful idea.
Manfredi Beninati ...........June. 2004"
Today I will just say that it has a very specific and foundamental role in human society. That of revealing new, unexpected or unnoticed sides of things around us. It has to show and explore hidden corners of our collective imagery without ever trying to draw conclusions or to explain things, though. that's not its task.
2. Which late artist would you have liked to meet?
Medardo Rosso. Alternatively Marinetti.
3. Who or what is your role model?
Nature.
4. Who or what has led you to become an artist?
A bet with my brother Flavio and my ex girlfriend Lourdes.
5. Where did you grow up? How do you remember this time?
In Palermo with my mother and brother. Of course it was the best part of my life to date. I reckon your life is about your childhood, really. whatever happens after that age is not that significant. I feel adulthood is about searching for the flavours of childhood.
6. Where and when would you have liked to live?
In 12th century's Tuscany would be fantastic to spend a couple of weeks just to look around, but I'm happy with the place and time I lived and live in.
7. Which work of art do you personally consider the most important of all times?
There are many, too many. I don't believe in hierarchies or classifications, anyway.
8. Which is your favourite museum and why?
I don't have one, actually.
9. Who has decisively influenced your career?
Flavio and Lourdes, Steve McCoubrey, Lorcan O'Neill, Paolo Colombo, James Cohan
10. What is the key question in your work?
a) How do I get there?
b) Why are people so superficial?
c) How would time interfere with or change my work or the perception of it?
11. Where do you get your inspiration from?
Within myself. From the fading memories of my experiences.
12. What do you consider the most important work of yours?
My life, seriously!
13. Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
I could be dead by then. Although I'd love to be alive and still able to work, in which case I'd have produced enough work to be almost satisfied.
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2009
CURA
"Incontro con Manfredi Beninati"
S.B. Davanti alle tue opere assistiamo come spettatori a inquadrature d’interni e figure, dei primi piani spesso, sfocate, che evocano azioni interrotte, come un sogno poco prima del risveglio, di narrazioni filmiche. Cosa resta nei tuoi lavori più recenti dei tuoi esordi nel cinema?
M.B. Tutto. Io vedo e vivo la vita come una pellicola.
S.B. Vuoi dire che riesci a selezionare i momenti, rimontando il tutto secondo un preciso disegno?
M.B. No. Intendo dire che cerco sempre di immaginarmi gli sviluppi futuri (prossimi e remoti) di ogni avvenimento e di ogni mia azione. Inoltre cerco sempre di immaginare cosa è avvenuto nel lasso di tempo in cui ho perso di vista l’evoluzione di una storia. È un gioco che faccio da sempre.
S.B. Quest’anno le tue opere saranno presenti nel Padiglione Italia della Biennale di Venezia e nella sezione Italy: No More than a Point of View della prossima biennale di Praga. Che cosa hai di italiano? Che cosa le tue opere?
M.B. Beh sono italiano e sono cresciuto in Italia e tutta la mia formazione è avvenuta in questo paese ed in questa cultura. Aver vissuto tanti anni all’estero (oggi vivo tra Palermo e Los Angeles) mi fa apprezzare ed amare la storia e la cultura di questo paese. Il cinema italiano ad esempio lo considero il più ricco, il Futurismo mi pare senza dubbio il movimento da cui nasce tutta l’arte dell’ultimo secolo, ma anche l’architettura (vedi Sant’Elia), la musica (vedi Russolo), la fotografia (vedi Bragaglia) ecc. Insomma vivendo fuori da questo microcosmo provincialissimo che è (culturalmente parlando) diventato questo paese nell’ultimo secolo, ho potuto elaborare un rapporto più onesto e libero con la nostra cultura che probabilmente mi rende più italiano di chi da qui non s’é mai mosso ed ha il mito dell’estero.
S.B. I “personaggi” dei tuoi quadri sembra emergano dall’opacità della dimenticanza in frammenti, o still per tornare al linguaggio cinematografico, in atmosfere di intensa intimità, grazie ad un uso vibrante del colore, che richiama certi ritratti di Balla, come la celebre Fidanzata al Pincio (1902). Come ti poni invece nei confronti delle esperienze dell’Arte Povera, che pure si sono mosse da alcune posizioni del Futurismo?
M.B. In realtà credo di non aver nulla in comune con nessuno dei due movimenti che hai appena chiamato in causa. Il fatto che io ammiri, anzi che riconosca la paternità dei neologismi artistici del secolo scorso e di quello in corso, e la forza dirompente delle parole e delle azioni dei futuristi di cento anni fa, non vuol dire che io sia assimilabile a loro in alcun aspetto. Infatti non credo di esserlo né esteticamente né emotivamente né tantomeno ideologicamente. I miei quadri, così come le mie istallazioni e generalmente tutto il mio lavoro nasce da altre esigenze, altri interessi ed altre visioni della vita. Anche tecnicamente esiste tra il modo di procedere di Balla ed il mio un abisso. Io dipingo a strati senza mai avere un progetto o un soggetto preciso; Balla dipingeva un’idea concreta chiaramente decifrabile davanti ai suoi occhi e lo faceva riempiendo in maniera densa anche quando rappresentava la luce. Io non so mai cosa succederà in un mio quadro. Ci lavoro a sei mani col tempo e con la casualità. In più ciò che può apparire come un soggetto o addirittura “il” soggetto di un mio quadro in realtà è sempre lì per caso. C’è finito dentro senza che io me ne accorga. È un elemento come può esserlo una colatura (questa spesso apparentemente casuale) che serve a trovare equilibrio in quella idea che é il quadro stesso. Idem rispetto all’Arte Povera.
S.B. Come me, hai origini siciliane. Dopo anni trascorsi tra Roma, Londra, Buenos Aires sei tornato a vivere a Palermo. Da qualche settimana hanno inaugurato in Sicilia nuove istituzioni dedicate al contemporaneo, mi riferisco a Palazzo Riso nella tua città e alle due fondazioni, Brodbeck e Puglisi-Cosentino, a Catania, dove era già attivo da qualche mese lo spazio di sperimentazione artistica BOCS, realtà che hanno la decisa ambizione di radicarsi nel territorio. Credi che i tempi siano maturi per un confronto sul contemporaneo, non semplicemente episodico, in Sicilia?
M.B. Sì mi fa molto piacere vedere Palermo e la sua gente fare cose normali, andare a convegni sulla situazione dell’arte contemporanea piuttosto che all’inaugurazione d’una mostra al Sant’Anna, al Sant’Elia, a Palazzo Riso, ecc. È un bel gioco ed è anche un moto per attivare o riattivare certi settori anche dell’economia locale ecc, comunque io non credo nel sistema dell’arte di oggi. Anzi da qualche tempo ho come la sensazione che presto questa bolla di sapone scoppierà. Più o meno come è avvenuto recentemente nel settore della tecnologia informatica.
S.B. Però tu in questo sistema sei inserito (sei rappresentato da gallerie internazionali, etc..). Come ti prepari a questo “scoppio”? Così chiedendoti dei tuoi prossimi progetti…
M.B. Realmente credo in quello che faccio e lo faccio con profondo senso di responsabilità. Non però, nei confronti del sistema dell’arte ma della storia dell’arte e dell’evoluzione della nostra società (quella umana intendo). Non che (ovviamente) creda che ciò che faccio sia altamente importante rispetto a ciò, ma credo che ognuno di noi debba accollarsi le proprie responsabilità verso gli altri e verso il mondo e la natura. Credo che ognuno di noi contribuisca nel bene o nel male a questa evoluzione qualsiasi sia l’entità del proprio apporto. Dunque lavoro con questo spirito, cercando di non esser mai pigro né qualunquista né di lasciar che gli altri facciano i miei compiti. I miei prossimi progetti saranno, appunto i miei prossimi progetti dopo i prossimi e così via. Contribuiranno a far sì che io capisca meglio il mio mondo interiore e che magari scopra un angolino nascosto che possa contribuire al processo evolutivo di cui sopra. Come dire ogni “fegatedd’i musca è sustansa” come si dice! Per chiudere… Non ho mai fatto (e mai lo farò, almeno spero) nulla per compiacere gli altri. Nulla di ciò che il “sistema” o peggio il “mercato” chiedeva o si aspettava perché non è né la fama né il riconoscimento che m’interessa, ma piuttosto la curiosità di vedere dove mi porterà la mia ricerca. Io stesso non saprei spiegarti come sia successo che io oggi sia un artista discretamente conosciuto e, in certi ambienti, tenuto in considerazione. Forse… fortuna?!
di salvatore bellavia
_______________________________________________________________
2009
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Manfredi Beninati (Rearranging the Landscapes Around)
by Nao
The subject of this exhibition is “mother and father”, so the titles of his works are also “mother” and “father”. The atmosphere of paintings is “Wonderland” of Lewis Carroll.
He uses a lot of colors, and puts the paints again and again on the main motif. The way of drawing brings the great depth to his works.
“mother”, this work is just “Wonderland”, I could find a little girl easily in the painting. I felt innocence covered ages as mentally aspect. The complicated lines express age year by year.
“father”, this one was very symbolic, and I felt physically aspect, and I think that it shows gender.
The extreme is very impressive. The feel of wonderland is same, but the inner side is different…. It's really fun to see artist's mind.
_______________________________________________________________
2009
URBAN
INTERURBANA
al telefono con Manfredi Beninati
di Francesca Felletti
LOS ANGELES
«QUI A L.A. È TUTTO PIÙ RILASSATO E PROVINCIALE.
INCREDIBILMENTE, SE SI CONSIDERA QUANTO GRANDE,
POPOLOSA E CONOSCIUTA SIA LA CITTÀ»
Che cosa ami di L.A.?
I paesaggi visti dalle freeway e il ritmo lento della
vita. È un mondo senza stress, messicano, dove non
è possibile fare più di un paio di cose in una giornata
date le distanze, ma si lavora benissimo. C’è tutto lo
spazio fi sico e mentale per dedicarsi a quello che in
città iper affollate non è facile fare.
Che cosa odi di L.A.?
Che sia a tante ore di volo dal resto del mondo
“utile” e che sia tanto diffi cile riuscire a mangiare
decentemente.
Com’è la tua casa?
Vivo in una villetta anni ’20 a Echo Park che la mia
fi danzata Milena (Muzquiz, musicista cantante e
performer dei Los Super Elegantes, n.d.r.) ha comprato
poco prima che ci conoscessimo nel 2006.
È una casa arts&craft su tre livelli tutta in legno,
immersa in una macchia di verde lussureggiante che
si arrampica su per la collina… insomma un piccolo
paradiso!
Il quartiere è misto: proletario ma anche un po’ chic.
E c’è una popolosissima comunità di musicisti più o
meno conosciuti nella zona che si ritrovano al Chango,
un bar a tre minuti da casa mia.
Quanto conta la collina di Hollywood?
Cinema e musica sono i settori principali dell’economia
cittadina: entrambi esercitano un’infl uenza enorme
sul modo in cui L.A. si sviluppa. Per esempio, qui fi no
a poco tempo fa si poteva ancora guidare parlando al
cellulare e questo, pare, per consentire ad attori, registi
e produttori di andare in giro facendo affari dalle loro
auto scoperte!
È facile incontrare un divo?
Per la strada no, alle feste sì.
In che cosa sono diverse Palermo e la città degli
angeli?
Palermo è un concentrato di arte, culture e storia, tre
cose che a Los Angeles non esistono. Ed è bagnata
dal mare più bello del mondo con cui la gente ha
un rapporto di amicizia straordinario, mentre a L.A.
l’oceano è vissuto quasi come un’entità estranea e
minacciosa.
E per quello che riguarda il mondo dell’arte
contemporanea?
Qui a L.A. è tutto più rilassato e provinciale.
Incredibilmente, se si considera quanto grande,
popolosa e conosciuta sia la città. A differenza di altri
grandi centri, il collezionismo non gioca un ruolo così
importante e anche i musei e le gallerie hanno un non
so che di atipico. Per un artista è un luogo ideale per
produrre, ma non per far carriera. D’altronde è una
città di confi ne lontanissima fi sicamente e idealmente
dai centri che contano. L’Italia è al centro del mondo
dell’arte, geografi camente e culturalmente. Basti
pensare all’enorme infl uenza che i nostri artisti hanno
da sempre. Palermo, nonostante sia ai margini, è pur
sempre nel centro del Mediterraneo, a due ore di volo
dai luoghi che contano. Ed è sempre più una città di
tendenza, dove si lavora abbastanza bene in termini di
produzione.
Non capita tutti i giorni di essere invitato alla
Biennale di Venezia. Che cosa presenti?
In realtà espongo contemporaneamente due affreschi
gemelli alle Biennali di Venezia e di Praga. Il mio
lavoro è fatto da un lungo processo di stratifi cazioni
e cancellazioni, è una ricerca di ordine nel caos.
Racconto me stesso, i miei ricordi fatti di continui e
improvvisi viaggi senza una meta, di case stracolme
di piante e di mobili: piccoli equilibri precari sia
visivamente sia emotivamente, che se rotti si
trasformano in qualcos’altro altrettanto interessante e
affascinante.
Manfredi Beninati
Artista palermitano, classe 1970, da tre anni vive a Los Angeles. Dipinge e crea installazioni.
È stato scelto per esporre al Padiglione Italia della Biennale di Venezia.
_______________________________________________________________
2009
TOMIO KOYAMA - Tokyo
INTERVIEW WITH MANFREDI BENINATI - By Arika Suminaga and Satoko Hamada
"All of my works I take it as a therapy, I do it for myself more than anything."
At first I would like to ask you about the title of this show, “Rearranging the Landscapes Around”.
That is because with Tomio, we decided to have a small exhibition in Kyoto at first. It was supposed to be almost two months earlier. So I had very short time to have to get everything ready. So we decided to go for two paintings, two drawings, two sculptures just to test the market. First thing that occurred to me was to take one photo of my mother, and one photo of my father, and to reproduce the photo more or less, roughly, in a painting, drawing, and sculpture. For instance, if you look at that painting, that is my mother sitting there on the table and that is my mother again in a drawing and a sculpture. But the landscape is always different. So Tomio asked me to give him the title, that was the first thing occurred.
So the works are based on the photo of the mother and father.
Yes, so I just took a photo ... roughly.
There is one real image and you added many fictional layers?
No it is like… nothing planned. Draw from the photo, (Manfredi imitates sound of shutter), more or less. …and then the image of my mother, image of my father and try to make landscape around them. they are both asleep, so i was free to make dreamlike landscapes around them. Then for instance you see the bomb there -this thing, in my mind, is a bomb!- This bomb used to be here too (Manfredi points at a sculpture). I didn’t like it around anymore. It was too obvious, so I took it out.
Why is there a bomb? It is very peaceful image for me.
Yeah. That is right. There can be peace around noisy thing. It is like life. For instance if you close your eyes and put your fingers up in the ears, it looks like nothing is happening. But then the world is in fact a… you know. To me that bomb was like a particle, like an atom.
Did you make the drawing first?
No. All together.
All together. At the same time.
Yeah. And in the mean time I was getting another show ready. So I had like twenty works in the studio at the same time.
So it takes a long time to…
Yes… even like those drawings... those are also made in layers. pencil, graphite and gesso, which is a kind of plaster. You put a layer of gesso, draw, throw the gesso again and it has to dry it for like two days before you can draw again. In the mean time I do another things. It is all like occasional, nothing planned.
Do you mean there is no plan for these splashes and brush strokes, just occasionally?
No. Looking for somewhere to start from. You look for things. I am very figurative although if you look at this painting as if it suggests abstraction. There is nothing abstract about my persona. Then when i say “occasional” I mean I let things happen. I want to be democratic even with my works. I don’t want to be too bossy, to impose my point of view on them. It has to be in between my point of view and causality, whatever happens...
Sometimes the images are from your dreams?
No.
Only based on just one picture or something. all the rest is made up out of accidents.
Sometimes I use images of my family, mostly family because I believe you should talk only about things you know very very well. Otherwise keep your mouth shut. Of course my family is what I know best. I am much more familiar with myself, my parents and stuff like that… than other things.
At the same time this painting represents the whole world.
Yeah, it is like a microscopic view of particle, you know. That is why they are so crowded. Because if you look in a microscope, out of maybe little pieces of this paper, you can see billions of things. Nothing really has priority. Everything is on the same level, nothing is like the center. That is really important for me. In politics, when I vote, I vote right wing but like most right wing people in Italy, I am very left wing. I am a communist here in my heart but practically, because I am practical person, I am right wing, because they are only people with a bit of common sense.
Are there many right wing people in Italy?
No. Everybody is left wing. In Italy we have had the biggest communist party outside the Soviet Union, with twenty million members, for forty, fifty years. It was almost like a cultural dictatorship. All artists still are communists in Italy. That is because you have to be a part of that system and that is probably why I vote for the right wing, because I don’t like that. That is like mafia.
Can I ask about sculptures too? How do you make this form since it looks very complicated? It looks like melting.
Yeah, like letting things drop, dripping colors and stuff. This is also kind of a plaster. This part here is so hard. Other parts are less hard. It depends on how much water you mix it with. And this is pink, that is light blue, because I mixed the white plaster with some blue or red pigments. It is a very meditative practice. A very slow process. First I try to make figure out from just dripping. When it does not look at all like a figure I was trying to do, then I start curving. It is like an experience. I had never done it in this way before. It is a good way of killing time too, really good. All of us should do that. It is really like meditation.
Here we can find the same image from the painting, sleeping mother. This mother goes there, and maybe somewhere else.
This is a collage and drawing within the work.
Yeah. There is a drawing underneath. This is also a meditation. All of my works I take it as a therapy, I do it for myself more than anything.
Are the images from many magazines and many sources?
This is out of three magazines and maybe ten newspapers. To me, collage does not really make any sense. I don’t understand collage, and that is why now and then I do one. Because I am trying to find the light to give collage a sense. If it is so messed up, maybe it makes sense. But when it is very simple, like two things, I find it almost offensive. I don’t like the works that are made in half a day, I hate those very quickly executed ones. There must be always a process. You will always have to be able to read the process. That is why I love Mika Kato, for instance. I know how she works. She makes a sculpture first -that must be meditation for her- and then she takes a photo, more photos, like she looks for the angles and finally she starts to paint…It is a perfect way to find enlightment.
I said “Ok. I bet you if I start now, in three, four years I will be at Venice Biennale.”
Let’s talk about this installation
I got the idea to make the installation when Tomio and I decided to move the exhibition from Kyoto to here. He said there was one more room here, a very small room. I thought we could do something like this and he said let’s do it. I did an installation in the show at James Cohan Gallery in New York in 2007 in a very similar manner. Once you enter the gallery and you find the reception here and then a room like this (Manfredi indicates left) , and then another room like that, only a bit longer. The first room was exactly like this one here. So when I saw the map, I thought this is just like James Cohan’s and we decided to do that. Then, because I had already given Tomio the title, “Rearranging the Landscapes Around”, then I thought we should do something messy.
There are many landscapes inside at the same time.
Yeah but you can make up your own, if you want to be stupid... I am joking.
What did make you combine such kind of installation with paintings or sculptures?
In the 51st Venice Biennial 2005, I won the prize and they gave me twenty-something thousand euros to make the work. Instead of doing a big painting, I thought I would like to do an installation. This is all fiberglass. It is all fake.
All fake?
Yeah. It was made in Cinecitta which is the Italian Hollywood, located in Rome. We built it in Rome, brought it to Venice and of course I worked some more during I was there.
So this is your first installation?
My first installation, yes. This also won the Audience prize. So a lot of people were asking me to do an installation. Since then I have done probably like ten. One in Rome this year from an old drawing which was about the light. We had three windows here on the left one window opposite on the door. We set all this light, very technological things with huge scaffolding behind the windows. It is all fake. We had morning, afternoon, evening and dusk. Light is changing constantly and it would also change in terms of color, in the morning it would be blue and night would be red, and it would also move around the room. (Looking through a book). That is actually from a drawing I made five years earlier for the same event. Do you have any of my drawings here?
Not Yet.
There is a big drawing called “Flavio e Palermo”, “Flavio” is my younger brother -he died three years ago-, that this installation is based on. This (Manfredi points at his sleeping mother) is also based on a previous work…this (he shows a painting from the book). I did this two years ago. When I asked my mother to pose for very quick photo, she said “What do you want me to do?” so I said do this. It is almost the same posture as this.
When we are collecting all the furniture and everything,
Did I have an idea? No.
No you did not have and idea.
I had a rough idea. I believe your work. You should work with whatever you have handy, sometimes.
Is this image of our life?
No.
It does not have to be. It is more about my idea of your country.
We decided to go for Japanese, but we had a very small budget... For instance that corner is the most Japanese. At least one corner, to me, looks and feels Japanese.
The screen is very effective for Japanese image.
Yeah. You can see through.
You were working with movie directors.
Yes. That was a very long time ago, I was nineteen to twenty-one. I worked on some films, and then studied cinema, taking films. And then I was doing nothing for five, six years. One day we met up with my brother and my girlfriend at the time in New York. We went to see friends in their studios, artists. They were making such crappy works. My brother said, “Manfredi, you are good at drawing. You should do that too.” I said “Yeah, maybe one day” and then my girlfriend said “No, You would never make it” and I said “Ok, then, I bet you if I start now, in three, four years I will be at Venice Biennale.” To me it was the only thing I knew about contemporary art. That was in 2000. Then I went back to London and started making works. In 2003, I had my first show, and in 2005, I joined Venice Biennale so I won the bet.
The experience with film maker inspired you, right? Your work is like a cinema set.
Cinema is my world, real passion.
___________
Japanese version
全ての作品は私にとってセラピーみたいなもの。
誰よりもまず自分のために作っています。
まず、タイトルの『置き直された風景』について聞かせてください。
トミオと最初に、京都で小さな展覧会をしようと話していたんです。そのときは今より2ヶ月ほど早い会期の予定だったので、すごく短い準備期間しかないと思った。ですから、まずはペインティング２点、ドローイング2点、彫刻2点で試してみよう、と思っていたんです。まず最初に私が行ったのは、母の写真と父の写真を1枚ずつ撮り、それを元に多かれ少なかれ加工して、それぞれペインティング、ドローイング、彫刻に仕上げていきました。絵を見ると座っている母の姿が見えますね･･･他の作品にもそれぞれ母の姿があるけれど、風景はいつも異なっている。その時トミオからタイトルを教えてほしいと聞かれたので、このタイトルにしました。それが始めに起こったことです。
今回の作品は全て、お母様とお父様の写真に基づいているのですね。
そう、ラフに撮っただけだけれど。
一つの現実のイメージがあって、その後想像の風景を重ねていったのですか？
いえ、何もプランはしていないのです。写真を撮って、それを元に描いていく（カメラのシャッター音をまねて）、母のイメージ、父のイメージがあって、彼らは両方とも眠っているので、夢のような風景を自由に配することが出来ました。たとえばここには爆弾を描いているのが見えるでしょう？これは、私の頭の中では爆弾なんです。こっちにもあるね（彫刻を指す）、他にも描くのはやめました。露骨になりすぎてしまうから。
なぜ爆弾があるのでしょう、私にはとても平和的な風景に見えるのですが？
そうですね、そのとおりです。平和とは、騒がしいことの周りにも生まれ得るものですよね。人生のようなもの。とても静けさに満ちていて……今この瞬間も、あなたが目をつぶって耳をふさいでしまえば、まるで何も起こっていないかのようですね？けれど実際には……わかりますね。私は粒子を、原子を描いているようなものなのです。
ドローイングを先に仕上げるのですか？
いいえ。全て一緒に。
全て、同時に仕上げるのですか？
そうです。さらに同時に、他の展覧会の作品を準備したりもします。ですから、スタジオにはいつも20点ほど作品がありますよ。
では制作には時間がかかるでしょうね？
そうですね。このドローイングでも、鉛筆と、グラファイト（石墨）と、漆喰の1種であるジェッソを塗り重ねているから、すごく時間がかかる。ジェッソを塗り重ねて、また全面にぶちまけて、そうするとまた手を入れるためには２日間ほど乾かさなくてはいけない。同時に他の事もやるので、すごく臨機応変な、無計画な感じで進めます。
こういった絵の具のしぶきやブラッシュストロークが、偶発的に行われるということ？
いえ。どこから始めるかは、いつも模索しています。何を描くのかも探すし。もしこの絵を見て、抽象的なものを示唆しているように見えたとしても、私はとてもフィギュラティヴ（具象表現的）な人間です。私の人格には、抽象的な要素は一つもない。偶発的な、と言う時には、ものごとをあるがままにしておく、という風に考えています。私は作品においても民主主義的でありたいから、自分の視点を示すための高圧的なものは作りたくないのです。何が起ころうと、私なりの視点と物事の因果関係、その間でなければなりません。
夢の中のイメージが作品のもとになることもありますか？
いいえ。1枚の写真とか、そういったものがベースにあって、その他は偶発的に描かれるということです。
家族のイメージはよく使います、なぜなら本当によく知っていることについてだけ語るべきだと思っているからです。さもなければ口をつぐむべきでしょう。もちろん、家族は私がよく知っているものだから。ミラノについてとか、母についてとか、そんなようなことならいちばんよく知っているので。
同時に、この絵は全世界を表してもいるわけですね。
そう、これは粒子を顕微鏡で見るような視点なのです。だから画面がこんなに入り組んでいる。もしあなたが顕微鏡でこの紙を（インタビュアーの質問用紙を指して）見たら、何百万もの紙の粒子が見えるでしょう。そこに優先順位がある訳ではなく、全てが等価で、なにが真ん中ということはない。これは私にとって大切なことです。政治においては、投票する時、私は右翼に投票します、でも他のイタリアの右翼の人々がそうであるように、私は実際にはとても左翼的な人間です。実質的には−−私は実質的な性格なので−−私は心の中ではコミュニストです、けれども右翼に投票する、それは彼らのことしかよく知らないからなんです。
イタリアには右翼の人がたくさんいるのですか。
いえ、皆、左翼ですよ。イタリアには、2000万人ものメンバーから成るソヴィエト連邦外では最大規模のコミュニスト政党が、四、五十年にわたって存在してきました。ほとんど、文化的独裁国家です。イタリアでは、全てのアーティストはコミュニストです。システムの１部を担わなければいけないからでしょうが、おそらく私が右翼に投票する理由はそれが嫌だからです。そんなのはマフィアみたいだから。
彫刻についてもお尋ねしていいでしょうか。とても複雑なフォルムに思えますが、どうやって造型しているのでしょう。溶けているようですね。
ええ、材料をポトポト落として、さらに色や形をドリッピングさせます。これも石膏の一種ですね。例えばこの部分はとても固いけど、ここはそんなに固くない。水をどれくらい混ぜるかによります。色は原色の顔料に白い石膏をまぜています。瞑想をするような感じで、とてもゆっくりやります。まず、ただ垂らすところから形を作り始め、それが気に入らなかったら、彫ってみるようにします。いい経験です、こんな風に作ったことは今までなかったけれど、暇つぶししているような感じで、とてもいいよ。皆やったらいいのに。本当に瞑想しているみたいなんです。ここにも眠っている母の像があって、きっと他の所にもいるんです。
この作品はコラージュとドローイングですね。
ええ。下の層にドローイングがあります。これも一種の瞑想。全ての作品は私にとってセラピーみたいなもので、誰よりもまず自分のために作っています。
イメージはたくさんの雑誌などからとられているのでしょうか？
これは確か3つの雑誌と、10の新聞から切り抜いています。私にとって、コラージュは全く意味をなしません。コラージュのことは全く理解していなくて、だからこそ時々作るんです。コラージュに意味を与える光を見つけ出したい。こんなに散りばめなければ、意味が生じるのかもしれないけど。だからといって、（要素を）たった2つとかにしてしまうと……ほとんど屈辱的というか、イライラしますね。私は半日でできてしまう作品、すぐできてしまうものが嫌いなんです。常に過程がなくては。そしてあなたはその過程を常に読み取らなくてはいけない。だから加藤美佳さんの作品なんか、好きですよ。どうやって作るか知っている。まず始めに彫刻を作って、それはきっと瞑想的なことに違いないでしょう、さらにそれを写真に撮り、もっと撮影し、まるで天使を捜すようにして、やっと絵を描き始める−−喜びを見出すためには、完璧なやり方です。
「賭けてもいい、僕が今すぐ始めたら、
3，4年でベネツィア・ビエンナーレに出てみせるよ」
このインスタレーションについても話しましょう。
私はトミオと話していて、京都ではなく東京で展示をしようと決めた時、このインスタレーションを作ることを思いつきました。ここにはもう一つ部屋が、小さな部屋があると聞いて、ではこのような展示をしたいと言ったら、彼はやろうやろうと言ってくれました。
2007年に、ニューヨークのジェームス・コーハン・ギャラリーで行った展示でも、ギャラリーに入るとまずレセプションがあって部屋があって、（マンフレディ左のインスタレーションの部屋を指す）それからここよりもう少し長い部屋があった。最初の部屋は、まさにこのインスタレーションの部屋のような感じだったのです。だから図面を見た時、すぐに同じような展示ができると思った。その時既に展示タイトルを「置き直された風景」と決めていたから、なにか散らかったようなインスタレーションにしようと思ったんです。
確かに、中にはたくさんの風景が同時に配置されているかのようですね。
ええ、でも自分で自分の風景を作ってもいいんですよ、バカなことを試したけりゃ！……いや、冗談です。
このようなインスタレーションと、このようなペインティングやドローイングをなぜ結びつけるようになったのですか？
2005年、第51回ヴェネツイア・ビエンナーレのときに、賞をもらって、20,000ユーロくらい賞金をくれたんです。その時、それで大きい絵を作る代わりに、インスタレーションを作りたいと思った。（ヴェネチアの展示の）これらは皆グラスファイバーでできている、フェイクの宮殿なんです。
全部フェイク？
そう。これはイタリアのハリウッドみたいな、ローマにあるチネチッタで作りました。ローマで作ってヴェネツイアへ運んで、もちろん滞在中さらに手を加えました。
ではこれがあなたの最初のインスタレーション作品ですか？
そうです。これは観客賞も受賞して。だからたくさんの人に、インスタレーションを作ってと頼まれます。それ以来10は作ったかな。
今年ローマで作ったのは（Quadriennale di Roma）、そうこれこれ、このときは光についての展示でした。ドアとは反対側に、３面ともに窓があって、私たちは人工的な光をそこにセットしたんです。膨大な足場を組んでね、窓からさも自然光が差しては消えるように。これも全部フェイク。にせものの朝が来て、昼、夕方、たそがれが来る。光は定期的に変化し、色も変わります−−朝は青白く、夜は赤みを帯びる。そして部屋の中を移動していきます。（資料をみて）あ、これはドローイングがあるはずだね、ドローイングを見た？
まだです。
『Flavio e Palermo』というドローイングがあって、それは3年前に亡くなった弟を描いたものなんだ、このインスタレーション（Quadriennale di Roma）の基になっています。
私たちが（インスタレーションのための）家具やら何やら集めている間･･･
僕になにかアイデアがあったかって？いいえ、ですね！
ええ、無かったような…
大体の案はあったんだよ。あとはあなたがたの働きを信じていますから。あなたがたが僕に渡してくれたものに関しては、なんでも協力してやってもらわないと！
これは、私たちの生活のイメージですか？
いえ。必ずしもそうである必要はないんです。これは皆さんの国について私が考えていること以上の、何かなんです。和の雰囲気にしようとは決めてたけど、予算があまりなかったからね。今見ると、このコーナーの所なんかはとても日本的かな。
このすだれが、日本的な効果を出していますね。
そう、中をのぞけて。
あなたは映画監督たちと仕事をしていらっしゃいましたね。
ええ。すごく昔のことです、私が19歳から21になるまででした。いくつかの映画に関わり、映画について勉強し、多くのことを語りました。そのあと5、6年は何もしていなくて。ある日、弟と当時のガールフレンドと一緒に、ニューヨークで会ったんです。そこで他のアーティストのスタジオをいくつか回りました。
そしたら皆、くだらないもの作っててね。弟が言いました、「マンフレディ、君はドローイングが上手いじゃないか。君もこれをやったらいいよ。」 私は「ああ、いつかね」と答えました。するとガールフレンドが、「いいえ、あなたがやるはずないわ」と言ったので、私はこう言ったんです。「賭けてもいい、僕が今すぐ始めたら、3、4年でベネツィア・ビエンナーレに出てみせるよ」と。
その頃、私が知っている現代アートのことと言ったら、ヴェネツイア・ビエンナーレくらいでした。それが2000年のことで、そのあと私はロンドンに戻って制作を始めた。2003年に最初の個展を開き、2005年にヴェネツイアに出展したから−−賭けに勝ったわけです。
映画監督とのお仕事の経験から影響を受けられているでしょうね？あなたの作品は映画のセットを彷彿とさせますから。
映画は私の世界、本当のパッションなんです。
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2008
LODEVEANS COLLECTION
"Manfredi Beninati" - by Maria Tidball-Binz
A contemporary figurative painter, Manfredi Beninati constructs scenes of magnificent beauty, fantasy dreamscapes that allude to a magical world beyond the immediate. His style is often compared to that of Maria Cruz and Neo Rauch.
Floating worlds that rise upon meeting the gaze, alluding beyond a domesticity that the structure of the works contain. The use of spillages of paint confer a warming eloquent romance beyond the canvas.
Extending beyond the gallery wall, he forgoes his traditional medium and creates installations that forge a similar setting and style, bringing the painting into the room. His ouvre also covers book projects, videos, sculptures drawings and collage.
After his High Levels in Classic studies, he entered at the Palermo University at the Faculty of Law, following his parents footprints. In 1990 he started film courses at the "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia" of Rome. He worked as an assistant director for important Italian movie directors as Tornatore and Damiani. In those years he divided his time between Great Britain, Spain and Italy.
Starting from 1992 he moved to London working as an artist in several studios - squats of the East End. In 2002 he moved to Rome. In 2006, returning from a long stay in Buenos Aires he moved back to his native town, Palermo. His work has been shown in a number of countries in Europe and America and is included in many prestigious public collections. In 2005 he was selected to represent his country at the Venice Biennale where he was awarded the audience prize for the italian pavilion.
In 2006 he received a prize from the American Academy in Rome.
Manfredi Beninati's work explores the theme of life's journey. He does this using the pictures of children and of adolescents at the edge of a forest, on a pathway, on a road, on a bicycle, by the sea. These images unlock in the mind of the viewer memories of the anxieties as well as the securities of childhood and the struggle of moving towards in life.
Often Beninati's works have strong literary and artistic references. Sometimes the artist uses images of boats, horses, cycles and other means of transport as metaphors, again, of the journey of life.
In a number of his works a mother and a child image seems to refer to both the "time honoured" tradition of "Madonna and Bambino" as well as provoking a more modern and psychological interpretation of the genesis of life.
Beninati's skills as a painter and draftsman are highly developed and, in combination with his cinematic eye, produce paintings of surprising emotional content.
Copyright Maria Tidball-Binz, Lodeveans Collection
Copyright Lorcan O'Neill
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2008
FLAVORPILL
Manfredi Beninati: La Natura Morta, September 2008 By Natalie Liechti
Executing a swift “Bruce Wayne by day, Batman by night” manoeuvre, Italian artist Manfredi Beninati presents La Natura Morta at the Max Wigram Gallery — while simultaneously showing at Liverpool’s Biennial. For those of us based in the south, Beninati fills Max Wigram with a series of drawings, oil colours and installations, all bearing typically dreamlike characteristics. The surreal, cinematographic images depict innocent fairy-tale narratives, which appear to mask hidden depths below their washy surfaces.
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2008
LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2008
Manfredi Beninati. By Sorcha Carey
Manfredi Beninati’s installations transport us to fictitious worlds, redolent of dreams and half forgotten memories. Interiors furnished with all the signs and hints of human occupation lie abandoned and beyond reach, tantalising us with their half-told stories. In To Think of Something, a new site-specific commission for MADE UP, behind the façade of apparently abandoned building, Beninati reveals to us a secretly inhabited apartment. The boarded up windows of the derelict house play host to a poster site bearing a hackneyed image of an idyllic tropical paradise; but a gap in the hoarding offers a stolen glimpse onto an altogether more domestic scene. Through the blocked up façade we peer into the small living room of a middle class apartment. The room, comfortably furnished, seems to have been recently vacated, the remnants of breakfast left on the table, and a half-read newspaper lying on the floor next to the sofa. A door at the back of the sitting room stands slightly ajar offering a partial view into a dining room beyond, while through a window we are presented with the rather disconcerting sight of a ‘real’ tropical sunset. Like a stage set that has just been vacated, or a novel denuded of its characters, Beninati’s installation sets the scene for a rich variety of fictional encounters.
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2008
The INDEPENDENT
Magical mystery tour: The Liverpool art biennial By Michael Glover
From cemeteries to shop windows, the Liverpool Biennial crams art into every nook and cranny of the city. ...
...along Renshaw Street on an uncharacteristically hot Liverpudlian afternoon, to seek out all the art that’s hiding in all these separate locations, some large and respectable, others poky and scruffy, and yet others impromptu, as if conjured out of the air. Some of them are not at all easy to find. In fact, it’s often a game of hide and seek. A couple of doors along from Mersey Collectables – the decrepit sign tells us that they are crying out for “Dinky, robots and tin toys” – I spot a curiously well-polished square of window glass framed by posters for local rock bands, local soft porn opportunities, local roulette – there’s a casino just along the road. A couple of men in black, wearing artfully red-framed spectacles, are already staring in. Art critics – or I’m a brass monkey. I wait – then do the same. It’s a tranquil make-believe scene just behind that window. A large, dolls’-house-size chateau sits in the middle of the floor. An unnaturally large, spot-lit tree is growing inside what looks like a large vitrine. This tranquil world of make-believe, amid all the scruff and the teem of Renshaw Street, is the work of Manfredi Beninati. A little way away, just beyond a traffic junction, stands a church – St Luke’s – which was bombed in the Blitz. Its walls and tower are still standing, but its nave and chancel have been open to the sky for the past 60-odd years. St Luke’s is playing host to a developing work by Yoko Ono....
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2008
The OBSERVER
It’s a long way from incey-wincey By David Smith
It’s a long way from incey-wincey A supersized Web of Light is the most captivating of many attractions at Britain’s largest festival of contemporary visual art For Beijing’s Olympic stadium, he helped conceive a bird’s nest...
... Peer through the window of an abandoned, burnt out house in the city centre and see a comfortably furnished middle class apartment, complete with breakfast remnants, half-read newspaper and unexpected sunset, intricately designed by Italy’s Manfredi Beninati.
... The Biennial, now a decade old, is set to make it a vintage one. Just remember to get a map.
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2008
The DAILY TELEGRAPH
Liverpool Biennial: ‘Made Up’ By Richard Dorment
The 5th Liverpool Biennial is a giddy finale to Liverpool’s stint as European Capital of Culture, says Richard Dorment The theme of the 5th Liverpool Biennial is ‘Made Up’— a phrase that in the local lingo apparently means ‘happy’ but to the rest of us conveys the idea of using your imagination and maybe telling a story. Not bad advice for any artist of any age or nationality. ...
... It was also worth the 35 years I’ve waited to see the city when the sun was shining. advertisement Even so, some of the pieces I liked most are best seen at night. To view the installation by Italian Manfredi Beninati you have to look through a window punched through the wall of a derelict building in the city centre. Standing there in the cold and dark, you are confronted with a vision of complete human happiness — a brightly lit drawing room with comfortable sofa and chairs, carpets, books, flowers, and a view through the window onto a tropical sunset. Newspapers and toys, a dolls’ house, and the tools dad is using to build a toy theatre lie scattered on the floor. But just as you are taking all this in, something moves and for the first time you notice the sinister figure looking in at the scene from the other the direction. It takes a split second to realise that what you are seeing is your own reflection in the mirror hanging on the back wall. Beninati neatly demonstrates what it must be like to be on the outside looking in - to see comfort, warmth, love, and security but not to be a part of it. Wonderful. ...
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2008
METRO LONDON
"To Think Of Something peers into another world", in Metro London, Sunday, September 28, 2008 By Christopher Brown
This year's Biennial is at its best when you stumble across things you were not expecting. During the day, you could easily walk past Manfredi Beninati's piece without even realising it's there. A small panel indicates its existence but, surrounded by posters, it doesn't stand out. The crowds of people that gather around to peer inside are the only giveaway. Two small windows have been cut out of the plywood board covered in fly-posters, which stands on the corner of Renshaw Street and Leece Street. Looking in and behind the facade of the abandoned building, you'll see the living room of, what looks like, an affluent family's apartment. Toys and painting materials lie around the carpet as if they've been recently abandoned and a door is slightly ajar at the back, showing a dining room. It feels as if you're peering into a different world and, though this could effectively be nosing around somebody else's home, the unoccupied room is so homely that it doesn't feel voyeuristic or uncomfortable. The fashions used help to reinforce the impression of peering into somebody's childhood. It's a pleasant and rewarding experience during the day, when you have to work hard to see everything through the sun's glare. The only real shame is that in the evening the light is so bright the installation glows like a Christmas tree.
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2008
FINANCIAL TIMES
"Liverpool unleashed" in Financial Times, 11 October 2008 By Richard Cork
The founding of the Liverpool Biennial a decade ago by James Moores, a relation of the great art patron of the region, John Moores, was an inspirational breakthrough. At long last, Britain cast off its national habit of refusing to stage a spectacular, regular survey of new international art. Before then, the whole notion of holding a UK biennial was regarded as a hopeless fantasy. Such events were only held abroad, preferably in sublime locations like Venice. ...
... Nor is Kusama alone in her determination to convey acute disquiet. The further I went in my exploration of the biennial, the more unnerving it became. On Renshaw Street, Manfredi Beninati invites us to pause in front of a grubby, poster-choked wall and peer through a dark gap. I had to press my nose right up against the glass before making out the living room within. Although empty, signs of its occupants could be seen everywhere. Breakfast remains lay abandoned on a table, while children's drawings were strewn across the carpet. All this normality, however, was contradicted by a bizarre view of a tropical sunset flaring through a distant window. And suddenly, I glimpsed my own reflection in a mirror, staring into the room like a seedy voyeur bent on disrupting family life.
This emphasis on the macabre can also be found in the John Moores Painting Prize show at the Walker Art Gallery. ...
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2008
EAST HAMPTON STAR
So Many Grains of Meaning at the Parrish - By Jennifer Landes
(8/12/2008) Living, summering, or just visiting a beach community, one often takes sand for granted. Pleasant to walk on, lie in, and make castles with, once it is off the beach it is less welcome. But not in the case of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, which has an exhibit celebrating the material and its implied themes on view through mid-September. Called “Sand: Memory, Meaning, and Metaphor,” the show is ambitious, filled with works by international and South Fork artists from notable collections. Five sections of the show address different topics: memory, conflict, the history of seascapes, the infinite and infinitesimal, and the physical and metaphysical aspects of sand. One of the most resonant pieces in the exhibit belongs to Jasper Johns. Mr. Johns is a personal favorite under any circumstances, especially the recent show “Gray” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the inclusion of “Memory Piece: Frank O’Hara” in one strong thematic section, “Time, Trace, and Memory: Footprints in the Sand,” stands out in relation to the rest of the show. The piece contains a cast of Frank O’Hara’s foot and a small, shoebox-size cabinet of flat drawers containing sand and the impression that the cast left in it. The cast was made in 1961 and the piece completed in 1970, four years after O’Hara’s death. The evanescent nature of sand footprints conflates with the fleeting quality of memory and life itself in a poignant and delicate attempt at permanence that conveys futility and obsolescence in volumes. The other standouts in the section, which leans heavily on Surrealism, are digital prints by Richard Ehrlich of an abandoned diamond-mining town in Namibia and the desert sands that have overtaken the buildings. Joseph Cornell boxes and a mid-1980s acrylic painting of an hourglass by Ed Ruscha are other strong works. Alicia Longwell, the curator of the museum, has been planning such an exhibit for years, the idea first coming to her from working on her dissertation on John Graham, the early modern and New York School artist and collector. “Sand was in a lot of art in the 1920s and 1930s,” she said in a recent interview. “I had that in mind and then branch ed out to the element of sand having so many fascinating aspects.” Ms. Longwell’s installation, while freighted and often overwhelmed by all of the thematic meanings imposed upon it, stands well on its own visually. It was an inspired decision to break up a portfolio of photograv ures by Felix Gonzalez-Torres of closeups of patterns formed in sand and distribute them among the different sec tions. The piece con tinues to have dialogues throughout the exhibit and shows the strength of the artist’s minimalist approach in comparison to different eras and means of expression. Andrew Clemens, deaf and mute from childhood encephalitis, began creating images with colored sand in glass bottles as a boy. Simply called “Sand Bottles,” they were made in the 19th century. In the conflict section, “A Line Drawn in the Sand,” Dennis Oppenheim’s “Reading Position for Second Degree Burn” from 1970 is still relevant. Using a book on military tactics in a red binding as a sun shade on his chest, in an era when Coppertone did not have SPF, he lay on the sand at Jones Beach for five hours, becoming his own sun print. The resulting chromogenic print records the act during and after. Yes, the burn could have been acquired anywhere, but the beach siting allows other associations, such as those of middle-class leisure and a willingness to forget violence and death during times of war. Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” series of photographs records the filling and erosion of figures she has dug in the sand. Sometimes the figures fill with ocean water, sometimes she fills them with red tempera or blood that washes out into the sea. While the theme seems similar to those of other works in the show, there is something very moving about the outlines of the bodies, something like those in a crime scene and implying despotic terrorism. “Carta Blanca,” an installation by Gabriel Orozco of sand and rusted cans labeled by the artist with a familiar beer label, have an ecological theme as well as a certain visual opposition and harmony. Both the beer allusion and the “white card” or “carte blanche” multilingual translation imply a certain indulgence and privilege assumed by those who would leave them there. The shoreline scenes in “Littoral Drift” are charmingly historical, pleasingly modern, and, in the case of Mariko Mori, cheerfully if distastefully commercial. Choosing a manufactured indoor beachside park, she imposes images of herself dressed as a mermaid to heighten the improbable and somewhat ridiculous surroundings. The mural-size conglomeration of six photographs contains several instances of her appearance in a kind of “Where’s Waldo” ironic display. Mariko Mori’s “Empty Dream,” a mural of six photographs, takes an indoor water park as a setting for the placement of her self-portrait as a mermaid. Some of the most profound works are placed in the “World in a Grain of Sand” section. Donald Lipski used Amagansett sand in his piece “210,000,000 Grains of Sand” to consider the lives lost in the 20th century. The glass box is like a terrarium or a clear casket and the simplicity is surprisingly moving. Another work that pleasantly surprises is Johan Creten’s “Torso 15,” a complicated layering of materials and visual constructs. He forms a torso out of concrete-and-sand-cast roses. The hardness and implied delicacy along with the undulating curves of the female form are a complex metaphor for the figure and the ripening and toughening of “what little girls are made of.” A section is also devoted to sand as a medium. It focuses on works that use it as an element in paint, the casts of Costantino Nivola and Matt Mullican, and its use as a complex sculptural element. Ernesto Neto’s “Life That Spreads Out” looks like some kind of alien life form with an approachable quality. The Lycra stockings he fills with sand to make a long, pod-like assemblage have a massive, space-eating quality that also implies dynamism. It is an example of Ms. Longwell’s free approach to her subject that also works well thematically. Less successful, at least visually, are works by Lynda Benglis, Roy Lichtenstein, Fairfield Porter, Alfonso Ossorio, Milton Avery, and a few others. A small work by Pablo Picasso brings out an important element of early-20th-century expatriate and European sensibility, but appears more illustrative than aesthetically or conceptually inspired. An installation in a nook behind a false gallery wall by Manfredi Beninati incorporates sand into a created tableau of a janitor’s closet. With a small, cutout window on one side to view the sand-sculpted elements and a more institutional door on the other to stress the utilitarian aspects of the scene, the artist creates a tableau of mystery, familiarity, and unexpected delight. There are many other works worth notice and personal examination, by Dorothy Dehner and David Smith to name two, but my recommendation is simply to go. These are works worth seeing in an environment and critical display that communicate and extend their meaning. It is rare that this region receives such a stellar collection of international artworks and it is a great exercise to see how South Fork contributions fare against them.
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2008
ARTSBLOG
M.M. 15ª quadriennale d'arte di Roma, giovane e partecipativa. Mi è piaciuta
Anche la 15ª Quadriennale d’arte di Roma è diventata partecipativa aprendosi alla comunicazione digitale. Quando entrate vi viene dato un foglietto in cui c’è scritto che l’edizione di quest’anno non ha un titolo, ancora. Verrà scelto anche in base alle proposte del pubblico, che è chiamato ad intervenire. ...
... Bellissima, come l’installazione di Manfredi Beninati. Una stanza misteriosa e decadente dietro una porta a vetri nebbiosi. ...
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2008
NEWSDAY
SHIFTING SANDS - By Gabrielle Selz
This week’s opinion essay by Gabrielle Selz was inspired by the current exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, “Sand: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor.” Here, she comments (in italics) on works from the show about how artists reflect on and make use of sand in their work.
All Things are from the Ocean, 2008 Mixed mediaMy son called this the sandcastle room. Not only is the sandcastle made of sand, so is the bearded little man. Is he the sandman? It’s like a little, hidden room, a dusty closet with a fantasy world inside. A few years ago we went to the Amagansette sandcastle competition, which is held in early August each year at Atlantic Beach. Like Beninati, over 300 contestants used sand and other natural elements found at the beach to create their own fantasy world of towers, spires and pyramids. That was the year my son was fascinated with all things dragon like, and so his favorite was a sand dragon, wings spread, flying over the beach. (Courtesy the Artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York).
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2007
UOVO
"Manfredi Beninati - NOTES FOR A DREAM” , in Uovo#13, May 2007
By Norma Mangione
ARTIST ON A BET (and painter in passing)
From a film that lasts a lifetime and should be seen from all angles to put the images in order
When you paint, you use photographs of your childhood or your relatives. What precisely is the relationship between painting and photography?
MB: If there is a figure, a person in the painting, it is usually copied from a photograph because I think it is important for it to be exactly as I see it. The rest is painting. This may make use of fragments, things I see. Like maybe now I see those flowers and then later I put them in a painting in the studio. It’s a chance to organize the imagination.
Memory is above all made up of images. It is mostly a visual memory. Your paintings seem to contain many simultaneous flashbacks to different periods, along with the passing of internal time.
MB: Actually, I have to really experience paintings. They must become me. I usually work on thirty or forty paintings at the same time.
Never one at a time?
MB: No, because I change my mind, cut and paste. This is the great thing about oil. It lets you change everything without leaving a trace, unless you want one. Another “line” you know, like how fashion designers have their “youth line” or their “sports line”– in my work it’s sketching. My studio is divided into corners: the corner for oils free hand drawings, table drawings, and sculptures. Everything is a separate moment. I like making sketches that are almost paintings, but in pencil.
I read you went to law school.
MB: I studied law just to stay out of the draft. Law has never been a part of my life. My passion was for the cinema. I started working on productions in Palermo in the 1980s and was an assistant director for three years. In the meantime, I studied at the Cinecittà Experimental Center but never finished school. I was always traveling. Normally if you don’t go to school, your parents give you a scolding. My mother was the opposite. Every now and then she would come to class and say, “I am Carla Garofalo, Beninati’s mother. I’ve come to get him.” And we would leave. But then again I didn’t go to school much because from about the age of 14 I would stay up all night watching films. Then in 1990, I moved to London. I made a bet, one that is still on, with my cousin, Alexis Sweet. The first one to make a film gets dinner on the other one. One day, he called me and said, he is English but has a Roman accent, “Ah Manfredi, come to dinner at San Lorenzo (a restaurant in London) because I made my first film.” But it turned out it wasn’t a film but R.I.S., a series for Canale 5. So now he is trapped. The second season is going so well they are keeping him under contract for another two. So I have another two years to win the bet.
When will you find time to direct a film with all these exhibits and everything?
MB: It is what I want to do. My real love is the cinema. Everything I am doing now is just in passing.
Let’s get back to London.
MB: I worked a bit in bars. I always traveled a lot. In 1996, after Gilbert & Gorge, we rented a studio in the East End, now a famous neighborhood. At the time there was nothing there, just a few Indians. How did you decide to turn to art?
MB: I have drawn constantly since I was young. Then I made sculptures. Actually, for me, drawing goes more with sculpture than painting. That year, I sketched and sometimes worked as an assistant for Gilbert & George.
Were they crucial to your choices?
MB: They are real artists and their work will probably remain important, but it doesn’t interest me.
Were they useful for meeting contacts?
MB: Actually, at the dinner after the screening of a film about them at the National Film Theatre, I met everybody, including Lorcan O’Neill.* At the end of 1996–7, I moved back to Italy for a while.
So you missed Italy then?
MB: I love Palermo. In December of ‘99, my brother (Flavio Beninati), my girlfriend at the time (Lourdes Cabrera), and I stayed together with friends for three weeks in New York. We saw a lot of crap. I was not an artist at the time and made a bet with my brother and Lourdes who told me, “So why don’t you do something yourself?” So I said that if I wanted I could be in the Venice Biennale, something that was unimaginable then. They laughed. Then things started happening. My girlfriend and I lived in a very expensive apartment. Since I couldn’t afford it, I moved to a pathetic studio, very cold, and there I really got down to work. I got back in touch with some people, including Lorcan who began following my work. It was his idea to paint, so I painted more than anything else. One day, he took home a small painting of mine, somebody wanted to buy it and so…
He gave you good advice.
MB: I don’t know. It’s all grist for the mill. Basically, this is my fourth year of activity since then. My first show was at Lorcan in 2003. I don’t think anybody in Italy has the circuit Lorcan has. He was director of D’Offay for around ten years, one of the most important galleries in the world. He was the alter ego of Anthony D’Offay, who stopped managing the gallery in his later years, so he has developed relationships with important people, museums and so on. A lot came about from the Lorcan show, shows in cool places like the Royal Academy in London, or James Cohan in New York. Cohan is someone I continue to work with, he has a beautiful gallery.
Tell me about your solo show at James Cohan.
MB: You’re talking about my exhibit in February. This is my second solo show. I did an installation in a large room, Fruits from an Ocean Nearby. It is framed in glass like a three-dimensional painting. Practically speaking, you are looking at a painting that is the window of a door.
What do you see beyond the glass?
MB: One of those studio-rooms in apartments from the 1940s and ‘50s, a bit squalid, very simple, with ‘50s-style furniture, wallpaper and that sort of distressing lighting that brings on anxiety attacks. The person using that room has gone insane and has started building a sandcastle on the desk. Hee has thrown everything onto the floor and even added an extension, like a wardrobe door, between the desk and the chair. That’s how much he was caught up in that enormous castle. The oils are in the second room, My Last Summer. The third room, 23 Days of Bad Sound and Grey Sky, has the sketches. But I would have liked to do an installation that would have expressed somehow the smell of my studio.
What is your studio like?
MB: A madhouse. I smoke a lot and you can tell where I stand the most because I throw my butts on the floor.
I read that the work you showed at the Venice Biennale [“Taking notes for a dream that begins in the afternoon and continues through the night (and is not canceled out on awakening)” or “Waking up on a beach in the scorching sun” 2005] was inspired by your grandmother’s house. MB: My great-grandmother lived alone in a house from the 1950s, with big rooms and marble floors. She was around ninety then, and over a hundred when she died. We only visited a very small part of the house. As children we thought the house ended there. Then when we were a little older, we started to explore. There was a room we never could enter, but we could see part of it from this small study. By opening a heavy curtain, you could peek through a glass door into a large room with a one of those mirrors made of squares – really amazing.
Was it all covered in dust?
MB: No, it was very clean. Another inspiration was an Eastern European cartoon of Pinocchio I saw when I was little. In it, when he becomes a boy, the house, which before was a sort of barn, becomes fantastical.
It must have been complicated to make that installation.
MB: It was the simplest work in my life. The idea was to make an abandoned room. I asked a friend I had worked with before about a good set designer and he sent me Francesco Frigeri who is excellent. I made detailed drawings of the environment that he then used to make the technical drawings. They built it at Cinecittà, and then brought it to Venice where all we had to do was age everything. Ed and I did that, and it was lots of fun.
How so?
MB: We put everything on it: plaster, glue, gray pigment, dust, earth…
Was the room space already there?
MB: No, the people from Cinecittà set everything up.
You could see another window on the inside, but not from the outside.
MB: That was the closet. I put up another installation in Argentina* in three days. I had fun, but it was a real mess. You could only see it from the window of the gallery. It was like an aquarium, a room/non-room. There really was no reference to daily life. On the other hand, a few months ago, Ed and I set up an installation for Arcos in Benevento.* I wanted to make a rainbow. With a photography director, we found a simple way of doing it. It would be a normal living room, very 1980s middle-class, with carpet and couches, a bit shabby, but with some furnishings (a bookshelf, and the leftovers of a finished meal on the floor, something from a Sunday newspaper), and somewhere this small rainbow. But it couldn’t be done. So since this Arcos place is a kind of a toilet, I made a toilet. The exhibition is called C’era una volta un re (Once there was a King) and I made a king’s toilet. It is a large room that looks like anything but a bathroom; yet there is a washbasin, toilet bowl, and shower, and it is full of mirrors… And this king is obsessed with playing darts, so there are darts, and a lot of birdcages and plants. Shelves with potted plants on them block the entrance, and a private beach lies alongside the bathroom. We put in a mountain of sand, a red and yellow painted sky, palm trees, and toy shovels – all really fake stuff. One great thing about this work is that, if you know how to make it, you can have a lot of fun.
You entitled a sculpture Baby Bookmaker.
MB: For me, Medardo Rosso is the greatest sculptor of all time.
Really? More than Michelangelo?
MB: Much more. Fidia, Medardo Rosso, and Benvenuto Cellini. I am making a catalogue with two pages of acknowledgments without specifying anything, just names and surnames like: Medardo Rosso, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Ferreri – people who have taught me something through their work, even just one work.
Almost a work of art!
MB: Sure, somebody ought to be able to sell it.
Do you usually remember your dreams?
MB: Not much anymore, because my brother is dead. They threw him out a window. I mean – that’s pretty dramatic. Since then everything has been a bit topsy-turvy. But usually yes.
Do they ever inspire your paintings?
MB: Not directly in a visual sense, but in the sensations, the atmosphere, yes. I’m unable to copy something. I can express the colours, the atmosphere. A photograph always gets an angle, a point of view on something, and that is exactly the opposite of what I am interested in.
You like to rotate around the thing.
MB: I don’t like Wim Wenders, but I did very much like something he said. He is obsessed with making a film that would last a lifetime. Because where there is a cut, he has a moment of loss before coming back into a new shot-sequence. He tries to imagine what has been lost, what has happened between the two scenes. I would also like to see what the director does while I am watching the film.
You said you want to make a film. Would you write it?
MB: Yes, at first I wrote, but I only did it off and on for a couple of years. When I stopped working as an assistant director, my close friend Matteo De Laurentis, who was very young then, was trying to make a name for himself by experimenting with TV serials, so I wrote a lot of the teleplays.
This explains the narrative that is always present in your works, although in a fragmentary, visionary form.
MB: That is fundamental for me.
In your paintings, we perceive a contrast between opposing feelings. On the one hand, serenity, peace, and feelings connected to the world of childhood; on the other hand, there is an anxiety, sometimes made technical through dripping paint. So it is a restless serenity.
MB: This probably has to do with my way of being. I hate good people. In my life, the closest thing to my heart is being as objective as possible. This always leads me to analyzing everything and so, without even realizing it, the brightest, as well as the darkest, things come out.
You have traveled a lot. Do you think an artist in Italy is at a disadvantage?
MB: I think knowledge is the key, in general. So the more things you see and the more angles you see them from, the more you can make an exact analysis of things. Apart from this, no, I don’t feel an Italian artist is disadvantaged.
What do you feel the critic’s role should be?
MB: One of reminding. For example, it is crazy that someone like Rodin, perhaps the worst sculptor in history, is so famous. If you visit American museums, like the Metropolitan, you see they are chock-full of Rodin’s crap. But a great, talented artist like Medardo Rosso is almost unknown. France has a system that works. They are very nationalistic. In Italy, it is the opposite. So the role of the critic should be to remind, to build a heritage, to examine the work of an artist through emphasizing the tradition to which they belong.
Contextualizing it.
MB: If one does not know his mother tongue well, he will never learn another language.
Are you superstitious, religious?
MB: No, atheist, or rather – I believe in love. Today its name is Milena Muzquiz.
Are you agnostic?
MB: No, because I think.
An agnostic can think but claims he cannot know whether or not something exists.
MB: But I am sure there is something. Even if you accept the theory of evolution, the idea of the Big Bang and so forth, before the Big Bang there had to be something. So it is logical that something exists that is more important than our social system. What I am against is the idea of religions. I hate religions. Maybe I’m pantheistic. God is in everything. And I would kick the Vatican out of Italy immediately.
Rome, 11/05/07
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2007
NY Arts
"Manfredi Beninati: The Painter of Dreamland" - By Laura Barreca
Manfredi Beninati’s painting is informed by cinema, photography and literature and, through it, he shows us the world of personal memory. Historically speaking, the artist’s paintings, installations and sculptures refer to the so-called “theatricalization” of visual arts, developed into international artistic production during the last 50 years. Artists such as Robert Wilson, Vito Acconci and Tadeusz Kantor used to avail themselves of theatrical scenes for their performances. They used real sets, whose fundamental elements like light, architecture and scenery also contributed greatly to the development of contemporary figurative painting.
Moreover, this Sicilian artist’s work is enriched by his experience as an assistant to important Italian directors such as Damiano Damiani and Giuseppe Tornatore in the early 90s. Beninati knows well how to use a movie camera and how to create images for the screen, transposing in his paintings and installations the visual equivalent of moving images. Through his cinematic perception, Beninati prefers frontal views and classic perspectives, building stages toward which the audience has only one observation point, just like in theatres or cinemas.
“Taking notes for a dream that begins in the afternoon and continues through the night (and is not canceled out on awakening) or waking up on a beach in the scorching sun” for instance, which was an installation realized for the Italian Pavillion at the 51st Venice Biennale, was the recreation of an elegantly furnished 18th century boudoir, only visible from a certain angle and through a glass door, symbolically representing the boundary between dream and reality. The separation between the artist’s world and the audience and between the transitional present and the past belongs to a private or imaginary memory.
The places represented by Beninati are the result of mixing figurative content with abstraction—loaded with symbolisms and always balanced between a real and a surrealistic dimension. These works stand between the memory of a past event and the representation of its oblivion. Another example is a recent work at Arcos Museum in Benevento in which the artist realized 12 Minutes of Self-Inflicted Exile, an installation that, as a dreamlike vision, could only be seen through a space hidden amongst the leaves of some plants.
Beninati’s artworks are always conceived with a narrative aptitude that recalls literary and cinematographic references, such as the visionary novels by Italo Calvino, the descriptions of Il Gattopardo’s sumptuous palazzo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and the fabulous mood of Luchino Visconti’s movies. In the same way, a visionary richness, somehow folkloristic, can be perceived; a richness that follows the decorations of Baroque style and the intense colors of Sicilian almond-paste pastry. So it is likely to find in a room space ships colored like “cassata,” shaped as Chinese tiny umbrellas, atomic mushrooms or aurora borealis that glows in the sky like the refractions of a prism.
Several minute elements, like little shrubs in bloom, show the intense care for details of the Flemish tradition. Even though it is not just an evocative style, there is a mimetic imitation of the late nineteenth century Symbolist painting, because in Beninati’s work distance and time exist. They are physical phenomena that define the existing space between two points and the facts following one another, or even the separation between an event that belongs to the past and the moment in which it is portrayed.
The artist stands in the middle of this temporal extension, representing a precise slot, a snapshot of the camera or the frame of a film. In this sense, even though the pictorial technique reveals a hyper-realistic attitude, Beninati’s works don’t claim to depict anything exactly as it was, but rather suggest a poetic atmosphere. Because the external observation point offers a blurry view of the place, an image of a person is rooted in a sort of a dreamland.
The artist once stated that, “In my paintings (as well as my other works), I deal with what I know the best, that is my vision of the world, the things that surround me, my memory. I speak of the distance that separates us from the things we see as well as the things that inhabit this distance and which, by nature, I tend to ignore. In other words, I paint and I draw anything found in my range of vision. Then I work to immerse it into the world where, it seems to me, this thing belongs. I try to find the natural balance of these things and this practice is sometimes very tiring. Often, I would even say almost always, I paint subjects from photographs or drawings with which I am very familiar (obviously, these are a lot of images from my childhood and adolescence).”
Time, as a main theme of his work, is also present in the recent show Flavio and Palermo (in the summer) at James Cohan Gallery, dedicated to the artist’s brother, Flavio. The exhibition includes the installation Fruits from an Ocean Nearby, the recreation of a psychologist’s room with a sandcastle on a desk, a symbol of the complexity of human desire and its own weakness, as in the nature of things. Under a dirty glass casket a spray-foam sculpture, surrounded by bucolic elements, evokes the style of Medardo Rosso, who used “to sculpt with the light.” A series of colored oils on canvas, as Untitled (Cerese), and Untitled (Pirrina” are the expression of this typical artist’s nostalgic style.
Biography
Manfredi Beninati was born in Palermo in 1970, where he lives and works. After receiving high marks in Classical studies, he entered at the University of Palermo Law School and in the early 90s he began to study film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In 1992 he moved to London working as an artist in several studios squats in the East End. In 2002 he returned to Italy where, in 2005, his work was selected to for the 51st Venice Biennale in the Italian Pavillion. Beninati was recently awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome.
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2007
TEMA CELESTE
“Manfredi Beninati”, Tema Celeste, July/August 2007
By Julie Cirelli
Prior to the opening of this exhibition, Manfredi Beninati locked himself in the gallery’s anteroom for days with a self-proclaimed “sand castle expert” from Long Island, hired after a google search. The two of them created a massive castle complete with towers and spiraling staircases, on the site of an otherwise ordinary home-office scene. the collision of two usually dichotomous landscapes - we are in a location wherein the parallel workplaces of the child and the adult for once intersect - lays the framework for Beninati’s favored motif: the gross, banal, adult terrain eclipsed by nostalgia for the bright and mystical imaginary world of childhood. Rather singularly, this nostalgia is communicated by beninati by means of the “psychedelic” palette so in vogue these days: watery fuchsia, electric heliotrope and coral, aquamarine, that call to mind the back-lit backdrop of a fish tank, saturate the large paintings populating the exhibition as well as the smaller dioramas and installations. Formally, both the paintings and the dioramas blur or fog their sometimes common, sometimes fancyful scenes with dripping streaks of color or gauzy grass and branch-like layers. A child sits at a table while behind her the room bleeds into a candy-colored, mystical garden; faint figures of women picnic in an underwater dreamscape, awash with palm trees, swirling feasts of flowers, streamers and bouquets; a cowboy and his steed gaze towards a lime-green horizon as it explodes into tie-dye; a listless woman reclines near an even more sedately seated monkey. Other sculpural works, though less visceral than either his paintings or installations, cohere fluidly with Beninati’s body of work: they are toys -resin dolls, dogs, and sundry plant life- seamingly coated in melted candy. The result is enchanting, if vaguely morbid. Beninati’s visual vocabulary seams based on his background in film. In the past he studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. His sculptural installations retain that set-like quality of static, atmospheric backdrop, and even his paintings, though complete in their own right, are like a scenography, as though the artist meant to perform an activity before them.
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2007
NY Arts
"Manfredi Beninati: Flavio and Palermo - Mary Hrbacek", in NY Arts, May/June 2007
By Mary Hrbacek
In his new paintings, Beninati employs soft, luminous colors to create dreamlike visions of a world suffused with feelings of fantasy and nostalgia. The artist dissolves the boundaries between magical interiors and natural exteriors by filling the interiors with bouquets of flowers and vegetation. Outdoor spaces fairly reek of the beauty created by natural phenomena like aurora borealis, where particles from space stream through the earth’s stratosphere in brightly colored, nocturnal bursts of light. Beninati transforms conventional architectural structures into mysterious imaginative spaces by constructing rivers and hills of rainbow-colored lines that penetrate through palatial rooms where elegant furnishings recede into light-filled mist. The viewer is seduced by visions of the luxurious ease found in a Mediterranean culture of another time.
Beninati ups the ante in the accompanying installation replete with detritus from a messy adolescent’s room at the beach. A sandcastle provides a natural element that dissolves arbitrary indoor/outdoor divisions. The untidiness of the scene elicits a free feeling that provides space for original, fertile ruminations. This same creative environment is offered the viewer in the artist’s paintings.
In the work Pirrina, a small room with a marble lamp table is transformed into a garden by pale green plant forms that spread over the walls, floor and ceiling. Softly colored strokes create a striped river of flowing paint that could be mistaken for streaks of rain on a windowpane. The fantasy garden room is alive with sensuous plant-life, defined by slender strokes and subtle floral markings.
In contrast, the painting Untitled (Palermo), displays a peasant boy on horseback, riding through an open landscape that is suffused with light. The scene recalls the imaginary aura of Thomas Coles’ painting Voyage of Life: Youth, in which a boy daydreams of castles in the sky. Again, as if in a dream, there are shards of melting pink, yellow and blue hues flickering upon a pale ground, evoking a sun-drenched afternoon. Small palm trees and bunches of exotic flowering plants hug the ground where strokes of paint form a fantasy river. It is an image of warmth and wellness.
A night sky in Untitled (Fes Hagosh) displays millions of stars, juxtaposed with naked tree branches that flash with emanations from aurora borealis; the phantasmagoric scene inspires a feeling of limitless ecstasy and euphoria. In the work Untitled (Pessede), three fairy women, or possibly sea nymphs, populate a world of delightful vegetation seen through soft white light. The figures engage in a lively discourse (marked by gestures and raised arms) while they recline on a soft mound of striped matter that creates the effect of a bed of moss. Behind the women, grasses flow gently in the blue-brown waters.
In Beninati’s uncanny vision, natural elements penetrate interior spaces in lyric images that transport the viewer into new aesthetic terrain. The artist’s sensitive use of the materials fosters the visual ease essential to those who experience his ephemeral images. These works elicit a fantasy world where man-made places are combined with natural forms, to provide an escape into an arena of sensuous harmony.
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2007
THE NEW YORKER
"Goings On About Town: Manfredi Beninati", in The New Yorker, 13 March 2007
A collection of candy-colored paintings veil landscapes and familiar-seeming interiors with drips, agate stripes, and aurora-borealis glows. They’re dreamy and lovely, like looking at the world through a rainbow prism. In the front, an installation depicts what seems to be a therapist’s office gone to seed, with years of repressed desperation finally popping out. The surrounding set is perfectly plausible (radiator, worn paperbacks on a shelf, swivelly office chairs, wallpaper), but the desk has been taken over by a turretted sandcastle, with an empty wine bottle and a full ashtray nearby. Wonder abounds.
Installation view of Manfredi Beninati's "Fruits from an Ocean nearby"
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2007
THE VILLAGE VOICE
"Best in Show: Manfredi Beninati", in The Village Voice, February 23, 2007
By R.C. Baker
Look through a glass door to a living room where a sandcastle has colonized a tabletop—this complex of crenellated walls, turrets, and curving staircases is so large that it continues onto a plywood sheet cantilevered over a chair. The ghostly frames of missing pictures mark the striped wallpaper, though a bucolic lake scene, an oceanscape, and some old-fashioned photographic portraits have been left hanging. The floor is strewn with sand and discarded cigarettes, wine bottles, coffee cups, and take-out food containers, as if some adult has tried to re-create the memory of a wondrous day at the beach in the midst of this curtained, melancholy room.
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2007
JCG PRESS
Flavio and Palermo (in the summer) an exhibition by Italian painter and conceptual artist, Manfredi Beninati opening on February 17, 2007 and running through March 17. For Beninati's second solo exhibition in New York, he will include new paintings, sculpture and installation. This body of work is dedicated to the artist's brother, Flavio.
Beninati is best known for work that addresses the nostalgia for childhood through the lens of memory. Using the visual vernacular of dreams and fairy tales, Beninati's work is filled with characters and environments that create a space where the unconscious imagination is rendered visible. His imagery embodies the same slippage between fantasy and reality as can be found in the work of Antonio Ligabue and the writings of Italo Calvino and Lewis Carroll.
In the painting Untitled (Fes-Hagosh), the night sky is bright with what appears to be the acid green and fluorescent pink blaze of the Aurora Borealis. Other mysterious light effects emerge from the ground, revealing a world that is both dreamlike and unsettling. In Untitled (Pirrina), a bathroom has been obscured by flowers, overgrown plants and streamers that transform into psychedelic patterns throughout the composition. While reinforcing Beninati's fascination with liminal spaces, these new paintings continue to reveal his interest in pushing the psychological and material boundaries of the work.
Beninati will also create an installation similar to his much acclaimed contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2005, in which the viewer peered through a glass door into a room of an abandoned eighteenth-century palazzo. For this exhibition, Beninati plays with the viewer's sense of perception with an extraordinary simulacrum of a contemporary domestic environment.
Manfredi Beninati was born in 1970 in Palermo, Italy. After studying the Classics, Beninati entered the Faculty of Law at Palermo University. In 1990 he began studying film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Roma, where he worked as an assistant director until 1994. He then moved to London, where he began painting full-time. His work was recently seen in Rome at Lorcan O'Neill Gallery, and was also included in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Recently awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, Beninati currently lives and works in Palermo.
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2006
UNIVERSITY OF DENVER
Manfredi Beninati - "Viva L’Italia Aglaura", Exhibition catalog, September 2006
By Matthew J. Westerby
The colorfully intense landscape of Manfredi Beninati’s painting Viva L’Italia Aglaura recalls an all-encompassing dream. As a former film director, Beninati knows how to frame a scene to evoke the eccentricities of time and place, lending a surreal quality to his paintings. The painting inextricably confuses time and place, and the panorama layers figures of children and animals scaled down to miniature. The canvas boldly presents a nursery of hodgepodge reality. The opaque membrane between foreground and background obscures the lines between fiction and reality. Anchored at the top of the composition, mustard yellow streamers frame the dreamscape like a proscenium arch, adding a sense of theatricality to the painting. Color is washed across the hazy background, stippled onto the decorative trees, and dripped down the color-saturated canvas surface. Viva L’Italia Aglaura speaks with a literary tongue and functions as a fairytale. The ambiguous figures placed in grasses and perched in flowers take part in the fantasy. Like the sugar-frosted cake at a child’s birthday party, Viva L’Italia Aglaura is immediately accessible, residing as it does in the constructed realities of memory.
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2006
FLASH ART
"MANFREDI BENINATI" - by Francesco Stocchi - aug/sept 2006
In Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money CBuy, we are taken by the hand and guideinto the realm of the abstract, the subconscious and the immaterial. It is the visionary but prophetic story, if we think of modern artistic language, of a young man who has the talent for creating dreams and selling them to those who are looking for them, thus getting the sustenance that would permit him to dream again. The stories that make up the film are written and interpreted by the greatest dreamers of our time, characters who, by charging the object with paradox, sentiment and irony, came face to face with universal themes and helped to ponder new issues that had not yet been considered. Today these are fundamental considerations, which did not exist before then.
In Richter’s film, Marcel Duchamp, Ferdinand Léger, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and Man Ray play with physical symbols and surrealistic images, immersed in an ideal dreamlike atmosphere. If, however, you approach the film as an amusement, in a lighthearted search for entertainment or pleasant evasion, you will be disappointed. The symbolism of the object and the introspection of the characters reveal thoughts that cannot be ewith ease and complacency. The same can be said when we speak of the work of Manfredi Beninati: a celebration with fireworks, heavenly sebrilliant and positive colors.
Manfredi Beninati, Untitled (Pirrina), 2006, Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 inches
Psychedelic shapes, visions coming from a temporary state of consciousness, which is superior without having been altered. Like the main character of Hans Richter’s film, Beninati peddles dreams to anyone attracted by his world, and offers a vivid glance at the transmutation of dream into substance. In a scene richly populated by myriads of objects and characters, the atmosphere is unexpectedly suspended. The air is rarefied. The viewer has the impression of having arrived a moment later and to witness what is left. The “action” has already taken place and this is what is left. Beninati erases and paints over, leaving traces of something that no longer exists and giving the viewer what is left of a time gone by, permeated with melancholy and charm. As in an abstract painting, there is only the essence of the memory, a scenic vision appearing in a theatrical setting.
From 1857, when Charles Baudelaire offered the world his Fleurs du Mal, man has always been dominated by melancholy, thoughts, desires and nightmares. And this leads to a strong complicity with the artist. Beyond this veil that seems to suggest distance, and through vertical strokes reminiscent of rain falling from the sky, something happens between us and Beninati, as he invites us into his magic garden. This impalpable but strong complicity, is not connected to the figure but to the structure of the painting that contains it. The superimposition of visions, sentiments and memories proves that an intuitive process can be very long and that something instinctive is not always associated with what is immediate. By using stratification, the process that buries our memories and makes access to them cryptic, Beninati incorporates his universe in a collage, whether it is expressed through painting, sculpture, drawing or collage.
In the installation at the 51st Venice Biennale, the creation of an abandoned drawing room, heavy with time, takes us, by means of a cinematographic use of the image, to an atmosphere reminiscent of The Leopard. A stratification of memory rendered as object, modulated by the presence of Nature, which, following the nineteenth century tradition, takes on melancholic traits. Taking notes for a dream that begins in the afternoon and continues through the night is the reconstruction of the artist’s painting in a cinematographic mise en scene at which the visitor, full of morbid curiosity, can peer through a glass and only imagine the rest. By assimilating, mixing and blending, Beninati creates his sculptures, solid hominids that merge as they melt. Reminding us of disquieting voodoo dolls, these creations demonstrate work on matter rather than a concern with form.
From the transfer of undefined dead matter comes new life. Left to his own devices, the hominid continues to live in the microcosm carefully created around him, in a fantastic and indefinite space. Even though the nature of the elements that inhabit the universe of these works is reminiscent of a fairytale, we cannot create a narration around them. Beninati does not allow it. Objects, characters and calls from different worlds and times are assembled without intending to create a logical whole. Their apparent unrelatedness causes short circuits, appeased by the democratization of the collage that places them all on the same level. Since there are no connections, there are no hierarchies. At first the obvious becomes incoherent and then interesting, and the mysterious labyrinth of dreams freely generates forms. Since nothing dominates, the intrinsic significance of the object is cancelled, leaving only its signifier. Thus, the observer takes on an active role.
By selecting the images he has before him, he bestows a dominant position on the figure that interests him most. The free combination of incongruous elements thus finds its natural expression in collage, the surrealist technique par excellence. In the introduction to Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes, André Breton describes psychic automatism applied to the visual arts as a photograph of thought, depicting reality hidden to the viewers, thus sensing the dominant theme of our century, the psyche. Indeed, Beninati does not intend to photograph what surrounds him, but rather what resides in him, freely leaving fantasy to prevail over rational conduct. The artist ceases imitating the surrounding aspects without abandoning figuration. By varying the placement of the various existing elements, he creates a new one that sums up all the others.
Beninati reveals his aptitude for narration with painting, skillfully writing about his feelings with images. The artist adeptly finds his form of expression with the brush, but his problem is not exclusively of a pictorial nature. Thanks to his multifaceted sensitivity, Beninati could also express himself just as effectively by writing or photographing. A language that sincerely expresses the psyche and that, thanks to the superimposition of different times and ways, escapes a linear view.
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versione in italiano
Piombando nell’astratto, nel subconscio e nell’immateriale veniamo guidati per mano da Hans Richter nel suo Dreams That Money Can Buy: la storia visionaria, ma veggente se si pensa al linguaggio artistico moderno, di un giovane che ha l’abilità di creare sogni e venderli a chi ne cerca, trovando un sostentamento che gli permetta di sognare di nuovo. Le storie che compongono il film vengono scritte e interpretate dai più grandi sognatori del suo tempo, figure che caricando l’oggetto di paradosso, sentimento e ironia, hanno affrontato tematiche universali, aiutando a riflettere su nuove problematiche ancora non prese in considerazione.
Riflessioni fondamentali oggi, inesistenti prima di allora. Marcel Duchamp, Ferdinand Lèger, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst e Man Ray giocano tramite Hans Richter con simboli fisici ed immagini surrealiste, il tutto immerso in un’atmosfera onirica ideale. Se si approccia, però, la pellicola con fare divertito, nella leggera ricerca d’intrattenimento o di piacevole evasione, si rimane delusi. Il carico simbolico dell’oggetto e l’introspezione dei personaggi rivelano riflessioni che non permettono d’essere condotte con facilità e compiacenza.
Analogamente si può parlare del lavoro di Manfredi Beninati: una celebrazione con fuochi d’artificio, ambienti paradisiaci, colori accesi, positivi. Figurazioni psichedeliche, visioni provenienti da un temporaneo stato di coscienza, non alterato ma superiore. Come il protagonista della pellicola di Hans Richter, Beninati spaccia sogni a chi viene attratto dal suo mondo, offrendogli un vivo sguardo sul sogno trasmutato in materia. In una scena ricca, popolata da una miriade di oggetti e personaggi l’atmosfera è inaspettatamente sospesa. L’aria rarefatta. Sembra essere arrivati un attimo dopo ed avere di fronte a sé ciò che resta. Il “fatto” è già avvenuto,
ecco cosa ne rimane. Beninati cancella e ridipinge sopra, lasciandoci vedere le tracce di qualcosa che non c’è più, offrendoci il resto di un tempo andato, intriso di melanconia e grazia. Come in una pittura astratta, vi è solo l’essenziale del ricordo, una visione scenica che appare in un’architettura teatrale, da palcoscenico. A partire dal 1857, quando Charles Baudelaire offre al mondo i suoi Fleurs du Mal, l’uomo è alla marcè della melanconia, di pensieri, desideri, incubi. Da qui s’innesca una forte complicità con l’artista. Oltre questo velo che sembra suggerire distanza, attraverso la verticalità del segno che forma una pioggia dal cielo, esiste qualcosa tra noi e Beninati mentre c’invita nel suo giardino magico. Una correità impalpabile e forte, non legata alla figura ma alla costruzione del dipinto che la contiene. La sovrapposizione di visioni, sentimenti, ricordi, dimostra che un lavoro intuitivo puo essere molto lungo, che l’istintività non sempre si associa all’immediatezza. Attraverso l’uso della stratificazione, quel processo che sotterra i nostri ricordi rendendone criptico l’accesso, Beninati fonde in un collage il suo universo, indipendentemente se ciò viene espresso attraverso la pittura, la scultura, il disegno o il collage. Nell’istallazione presentata alla 51 Biennale di Venezia la creazione di un salotto abbandonato, carico di tempo, ci riconduce mediante un uso cinematografico dell’immagine ad atmosfere che richiamano a Il Gattopardo. Una stratificazione della memoria resa oggetto, cadenzata dalla presenza della Natura che, partendo dalla tradizione Ottocentesca, assume tratti melanconici.
Prendere appunti per un sogno da iniziare di pomeriggio e continuare la notte è una ricostruzione della pittura dell’artista in una messa in scena cinematografica, verso la quale il visitatore, carico di morbosa curiosità, può sbirciare attraverso il vetro e solo immaginarsi il resto. Assimilando, mescolando, fondendo, Beninati crea le sue sculture, ominidi solidi che si uniscono sciogliendosi. Richiamandoci a inquietanti bambole dei riti voodoo, queste creazioni mostrano un lavoro sulla materia più che uno studio di carattere formale. Attraverso il trasferimento di materia morta non meglio definita, una nuova prende vita. Lasciato all’abbandono, l’ominide continua a vivere nel microcosmo creatogli accuratamente intorno, accolto da uno spazio fantasioso, indefinito. Sebbene la natura degli elementi che abitano l’universo di questi lavori ci riconduce a una fiaba, intorno ad essi non si può costruire una narrazione. Beninati non ce lo consente. Oggetti, personaggi, richiami provenienti da mondi e tempi diversi, sono radunati senza voler formare un’unità logica. La loro apparente estraneità determina cortocircuiti, placati dalla democratizzazione del collage che li pone tutti sullo stesso piano. In mancanza di connessioni non esistono gerarchie. L’ovvio diviene prima incoerente, poi interessante e il misterioso labirinto dei sogni dà libera nascita alle forme. Nulla domina sull’altro, cancellando il significato intrinseco dell’oggetto, lasciandone solo il suo significante. L’osservatore guadagna così un ruol o attivo: selezionando le immagini che ha di fronte, conferisce una posizione dominante alla figura che più gli interessa.
Il libero accostamento di elementi incongrui trova quindi la sua naturale espressione nel collage, tecnica surrealista per eccellenza. Nell’introduzione al romanzo-collage di Max Ernst La femme 100 tetes Andrè Breton descrive l’automatismo psichico applicato alle arti visive come una fotografia del pensiero raffigurante la realtà che viene nascosta agli altri, intuendo così la tematica dominante del nostro secolo, quella della psiche. Beninati non intende infatti fotografare ciò che gli è intorno, ma ciò che abita in lui, lasciando liberamente prevalere la fantasia sulla condotta razionale. Senza abbandonare la figurazione, l’artista non rompe con l’imitazione degli aspetti circostanti. Variando la disposizione dei vari elementi esistenti, ne crea uno nuovo che tutti gli altri riassume. Beninati manifesta la sua vocazione al racconto con la pittura, scrivendo abilmente con immagini i suoi sentimenti. L’artista trova sapientemente la sua forma espressiva con il pennello, ma il suo non è un problema esclusivamente pittorico: la sensibilità trasversale di Beninati gli permetterebbe di esprimersi anche scrivendo o fotografando con ugual efficacia. Un linguaggio che rivela una sincera espressione della psiche che alla sovrapposizione di tempi e di modi diversi, fugge allo sguardo lineare.
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2006
NY ARTS
La Biennale - Tobias Verlende is in Venice
Arriving on a sunny summer afternoon in the wonderful city of Venice... This year, Venice sees its 51st International Arts Exhibition...
Among all these wonderful works in the numerous pavilions, there are three artists that deserve a special mention. One of these is the absolutely impressive installation of the artist Manfredi Beninati in the Italian pavilion -titled Prendere appunti per un sogno da iniziare di pomeriggio e continuare la notte (e che non si cancella al risveglio ...) -from 2005. One could easily miss this work, since it's hidden behind a dirty, old mirror in the corner of a small room. I saw many visitors who just looked at the "mirror" or "old painting" and then went on to the next piece of art. I admit that this could have also happened to me but the visitor before me put his face so close to the "mirror" that I assumed there must be something behind it. If you mobe very close, you will get a glance of the fantastic installation which is in a hidden room only seen through the painting. The room is an old living room from a different time, a forgotten world. The viewer gets the feeling of peeking into a secret room that has not been entered in a long time and the mystery lies in all of the objects around.
...
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2006
CONTEMPORARY
"Manfredi Beninati"
By Nicholas Cullinan
THE paintings, collages, sculptures and installations of Manfredi Beninati recall rich repositories of memory, both real and imagined. Beninati, born in Palermo but now resident near Rome, infuses his works with intermingling stratas of nostalgia, melancholy and decay. Some of his paintings and drawings derive their titles from the imaginary cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Kahn in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. While Calvino’s interpretation of Marco Polo manipulates memory by basing all of the narrator’s fantastic voyages to exotic metropolises solely on Venice, Beninati also explores in his works the blurry line between remembering and forgetting, truth and fiction.
Childhood memories – real, embellished or totally imagined – are replayed through the cinematic aspect of Beninati’s paintings, which recall his beginnings as an assistant director to Tornatore and Damiani. Many of Beninati’s works evoke a subtle transience, such as the fleeting half-light in his paintings that seems to be dusk – the transition between day and night. Equally, the presence of photography in Beninati’s paintings in the form of prosaic but poignant snapshots, recalls Roland Barthes’s description of the temporal dislocation that occurs when we pose for the camera: ‘I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a microvision of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a spectre.’
Manfredi Beninati, Untitled (Fes-Hagosh), 2006, Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 inches
Nostalgia, which in itself implies mourning and melancholy, permeates Beninati’s work like mould. This comes not just from his iconography, which reclaims remnants such as old family photographs to imply loss as well as recuperation, but also his technique. Even paintings in his studio that are wet and unfinished have already acquired a patina of age, reminding us that memories are as disquieting as they are comforting.
Beninati’s recent wax sculptures, on show in his solo exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome (November, 2005), are reminiscent of Medardo Rosso in their material, while their Technicolor hues recall brightly coloured, sickly-sweet Sicilian cakes. Even in such cloying confections, the air of decay that pervades these works can suggest something more sinister, such as the corpses of the catacombs of Palermo. Sicily’s cannoli and cadavers – both eerily well-preserved, but subject to decay – provoke a simultaneous attraction and repulsion that is echoed in Beninati’s wax wonderlands.
After taking part in high-profile shows such as last year’s ‘Expander’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, Beninati’s installation at this year’s Venice Biennale was wilfully obscure. Viewers had to peer through a dirty glass window at the end of a small corridor, barely able to make out in the twilight a full-scale reconstruction (from memory) of the artist’s youthful discovery of a room in his great-grandmother’s crumbling palazzo. In this and other works by Beninati, we are left peering through a glass darkly.
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2005
ART NEWS
"Manfredi Beninati"
by Jonathan Turner
Manfredi Beninati is one of only four Italian artists included in the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale (through the 6th of this month); as such, his paintings, collages, and sculptures are under close scrutiny in Italy.
This talented young artist from Palermo emerged on the scene only recently, and in his second solo show in Rome, he continues to address childhood, memory, and nostalgia. His reference points are extremely personal, and he draws from a variety of Italian sources, such as the vivid expressionism of the early-20th-century painter Antonio Ligabue and the intense literary reflections of Italo Calvino.
Beninati’s sculptural series “Baby Bookmaker” (2005) is inspired by the work of Milanese sculptor Medardo Rosso. Like Rosso, he abolishes precise contours and uses solid materials in a painterly, impressionistic manner. He coats his figures in waxlike drips of white resin, with splashes of pastel pink and baby blue that are evocative of a nursery. Sometimes he fuses human forms with their surrounding environments. One work depicts an infant with a litter of puppies at his feet trapped in a dreamscape of leaves, twigs, and flowers. In another sculpture, a small child is entangled in the vines, as though the vines, as though the vegetation has become carnivorous.
More wild plants encroach on domestic situations in Beninati’s “Rescued Pictures,” a series of oil paintings of scenes salvaged from memory. One shows a garden growing into a plush, slightly creepy Sicilian parlor through a window, disrupting an airless atmosphere of lace, brocade, and gilt.
In Palermo (2005), a handsome young man sits on a lawn while the hazy forms of five pink swans loom behind him. This winsome, limpid self-portrait shows the life of the artist as the fable of “The Ugly Duckling.” - Jonathan Turner
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2005
ARTFORUM
"Manfredi Beninati"
by Francesco Stocchi
For his second solo show at Lorcan O'Neill Gallery, Manfredi Beninati has filled the space with nostalgia, color, and beauty. What unites the Sicilian artist's paintings, sculptures, and collages (as well as his current installation at the Venice Biennale, in which visitors peer through a small, dirty window at what looks like an abandoned eighteenth-century drawing room) is a controlled chaos, an oscillation between poetry and technical rigor. In his new show, anecdotes from the artist's childhood are interwoven with religious visions, fairy tale characters, and Italian literary references. Beninati's sculptures, which are on view here for the first time, are effective three-dimensional realizations of his sensibility. Made of waxy resin, his figures seem to inhabit space itself uncertainly, melding surreal strangeness with the melancholy of memory. Looking at these works, the visitor is drawn into a world where unconnected realities find a mutual harmony and where the unconscious reveals itself. Boats, gnomes, flowers, ducks, planets, birds, Madonna and child, veiled human figures, characters drawn from Alice in Wonderland, all inhabit Beninati's work, having seemingly emerged from the labyrinthine mystery of dreams.
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2005
Номи
"This Is So Contemporary, Contemporary, Contemporary!.."
by Alexander Kotlomanov
[...] Некоторые проекты неожиданно удивляют своей глубиной. В итальянском павильоне это — инсталляция Манфреди Бенинати (Manfredi Beninati). Для того чтобы ее увидеть, нужно сделать несколько шагов по узкому коридору и посмотреть в темное окошечко в стене. За окошком скрывается комната как бы XVIII века, со столом и стульями, покрытыми рокайльными завитушками, даже с цветами в вазе и картинами на стене, но на всем этом лежит такой слой пыли, будто в эту тайную комнату не входили с тех пор, как в ней что-то произошло, — наверное, все в том же XVIII веке. Инсталляцию Бенинати можно было бы посчитать очередным «аттракционом», если бы не ее столь скрупулезная и художественная организация с вниманием к соотношению цветов, полутонам и распределению света. Она представляет собой сложный трехмерный натюрморт со всем символизмом, присущим этому жанру, казалось бы, только классического искусства. [...]
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2005
The Art Life
"Deep Frieze"
[...] We mentioned last week how we had tried to see the work of Manfredi Beninati in Rome but hadn’t been able to. We shouldn’t have worried because his work was on display at Frieze. We had described his work as a kind of figurative Maria Cruz, but that was way off, it’s like a figuartive Ricky Swallow, because his work was displayed right next to the Boy from Oz’s monkey man watercolours. It all makes sense now. [...]
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2005
The Art Life
"The Glory That Was Rome"
[...] We had come to see the work of Manfredi Beninati. Born in 1970, Beninati is part of the younger generation of Italian painters, and he makes pictures in a style that plugs right into the international contemporary aesthetic. Featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, Beninati is the kind of artist who a lot of younger Australian artists could identify with. His paintings are loose and washy figurative dreamscapes that make the viewer feel as if there’s a thick gauze on the surface of the painting and a story book world floating behind it. Imagine a figurative Maria Cruz painting with a good dose of Neo Rausch mixed into a Trans Avant-Garde soup. It’s crazy, but it works. [...]
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Painting
Beninati's painting is dreamy, thin, built in layers and erasures on a seemingly impossible balance, where all planes are interwoven canceling each other and all objects are portrayed in the same plane. It's a painting made of memories and rendered the same way with unreal atmosphere where there is not only one light source but many, where all hierarchies lose their strenght. In some ways, however, this lack of hierarchy gives his paintings a sense of sumptuousness , monumentality, where the monument is the light itself, which reveals details of the chaotic world that it encloses. His work is often described as an ambiguous mix of childhood innocence and disturbing darkness.
Installations
chaos and light are also the two main ingredients of his installations, which, in fact, could be read as an evolution in a three-dimensional space of his canvases. Since his first installation (beautifully hidden and inaccessible where an eighteenth-century sitting room was painstakingly reproduced in 1:1 scale, complete with wood paneling and curtains, columns and arches, furnishings and decorations, barely visible through the glass door, semi-darkened with dirt and dust) this line of continuity between the two-dimensionality of his painting and the expansion of his world without rules in the three-dimensional was easily readable. They are real staged or even film sets where all those elements, atmospheres, those ideas, that his paintings were no longer able to contain are collected and reorganized, here too without a logical order.
Painting
Beninati's painting is dreamy, thin, built in layers and erasures on a seemingly impossible balance, where all planes are interwoven canceling each other and all objects are portrayed in the same plane. It's a painting made of memories and rendered the same way with unreal atmosphere where there is not only one light source but many, where all hierarchies lose their strenght. In some ways, however, this lack of hierarchy gives his paintings a sense of sumptuousness , monumentality, where the monument is the light itself, which reveals details of the chaotic world that it encloses. His work is often described as an ambiguous mix of childhood innocence and disturbing darkness.
Installations
chaos and light are also the two main ingredients of his installations, which, in fact, could be read as an evolution in a three-dimensional space of his canvases. Since his first installation (beautifully hidden and inaccessible where an eighteenth-century sitting room was painstakingly reproduced in 1:1 scale, complete with wood paneling and curtains, columns and arches, furnishings and decorations, barely visible through the glass door, semi-darkened with dirt and dust) this line of continuity between the two-dimensionality of his painting and the expansion of his world without rules in the three-dimensional was easily readable. They are real staged or even film sets where all those elements, atmospheres, those ideas, that his paintings were no longer able to contain are collected and reorganized, here too without a logical order.
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