The Unassailable Mirage: Luigi Benedicenti’s Mirror Painting
It is ordinary existence, captured by sublime painting, that makes Chardin’s brioche desirably edible; the peeled fruit, the split watermelon oozing sweet juice in a seventeenth-century Flemish still life are triumphant presences—perfect in their idealized anatomy, and yet inedible. And yet, soaked in etching and existential malaise, Morandi’s bread is edible, even ordinary; Warhol’s Campbell’s soup will never be. Thiebaud’s painterly slices of cake make us want to devour them—not just with our eyes: they are soft, buttery, creamy, yet “toxic” like certain wondrous mushrooms. Time and memory, instead, lend edibility to the most elusive sweet: Proust’s madeleine. By contrast, Oldenburg’s hamburgers and Roy Lichtenstein’s roast chickens are timeless—and therefore scentless.
In the same way, there is no trace of lived life, or of the kitchen, even in the drugstores—settings long favored by hyperrealist or photorealist painting, now fully codified in art history. They glisten but give off no scent; they ooze only to turn cold; they tempt only to vanish, like mocking mirages—even the confections arranged by Luigi Benedicenti.
The separation, if not outright opposition, between the “natural” and the “artificial” marks two of the main paths followed by the visual arts. It is not necessarily a question unique to contemporary art: in the past, naturalism and geometry rarely found harmony—except in circumstances that now seem unrepeatable, just as the very notion of harmony feels remote.
There are those—especially artist-photographers such as Gursky and Struth—who have taken to the extreme the intransitivity of geometry and the uninhabitability of the “ideal cities” imagined by Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Rationalist utopias.
The insistent, almost ostentatious embrace of artifice—a parallel world, a beauty that is possible but not natural—typical of many contemporary artists raised under the cold star of the “post-human,” lends Benedicenti’s painting a sense of timeliness that is now more sharply defined.
As Leda Cempellin recently pointed out, it took more than thirty years to move beyond the ideological reading—aimed at denouncing the decadent and hedonistic aspect of Hyperrealism—sparked by Harald Szeemann’s 1972 edition of Documenta in Kassel, where supposed celebrators of American consumerism and capitalism were set in opposition to conceptual pauperists. And even then, beyond the polemics, the same old tension reemerged: on one side, hyperrealist artifice; on the other, the raw nature of Joseph Beuys.
During those same years, Hyperrealism began to be seen as a branch of Pop Art; the problem was that the times were not yet ripe for a more profound reading of the work of Warhol and company.
One could not yet grasp the melancholic and existential undertone concealed within the hyper-graphic shell of artifice, of the detached ready-made, of seriality.
The hyperrealists—Benedicenti included—employ the ready-made through the impassive lens of photography. And it is the “method” itself—painting executed with flawless technique, based on fixed rules—that defines the serial quality of this form of art. Compared to the historicized Hyperrealism, however, Benedicenti radicalizes the notion of artifice, “selecting” subjects that evoke a hyper-idealized, excessively desirable beauty.
Desire, which can never be fulfilled through real experience but only through a morbid, voyeuristic inclination, is the first engine of the unease provoked by Benedicenti’s paintings. It is a sensation typical of our civilization, which consumes images at a bulimic pace while suppressing the senses most tied to being itself: the taboo of smell will soon be joined by that of touch. Hearing—the ability to listen (to feel, in the fullest sense of the word)—has already long been suppressed.
Food, in Benedicenti’s work, often takes on the icy appearance of an icon of desire—like a nature made unassailable and untouchable precisely because fiction renders it infinitely more perfect than reality.
If we reaffirm Hyperrealism’s descent from Pop Art—and, within Pop Art, identify strong signs of Vanitas (beyond the apparent celebration of consumer and media culture)—and if we accept even partial clues of social critique, then we have more than enough to acquit Benedicenti of any charge of empty virtuosity or superficial decorativism.
But perhaps the melancholic tone of the Turin-born artist’s work is better traced through other clues—through the reappearance of iconography already found in earlier pieces. One recalls a self-portrait distorted by the convex surface of a mirror. In this exhibition, we find a still life “in the mirror,” this time reflected in the fragile gleam of Christmas ornaments—an apt ingredient for a Vanitas of the 2000s.
At this point, one suspects that Benedicenti’s painting is built on a double reflection: that of the painting which perfectly mirrors the subject, offering a “better” version than reality itself; and that of a reality transfigured—made sharper—by a kind of light that only a reflective surface can return. A light and a clarity, however, that provoke disquiet: the same unease we feel when looking into a double mirror, which does not return the familiar image—the Narcissus we recognize each day—but the face by which others recognize us.
Benedicenti’s still lifes live in the ineffable beauty of the monstrous, precisely because they appear under conditions unfamiliar to our everyday perception.
In his painting, pastries, figs, cherries, poppies, and other wildflowers repel the viewer by their frightening, outsized proportions—bestowed by the artist’s gaze. At the same time, glazes, sugars, taut skins, and transparent petals attract and hypnotize us through their nearly obscene sharpness of focus.
The viewer draws near to these sweet things and often desires them—but perhaps finds peace in realizing, up close, that they are nothing more than a crystalline mirage, captured in the mirror of a painting that is both beautiful and cruel.
Franco Fanelli
