THE TASTE OF PAINTING
On a poetic level and in terms of immediate communication, the work of art—and especially contemporary art—often presents a mysterious complexity, which led Arnold Hauser to write that the simple formal laws of art are by their nature no different from the rules of a game: “However complicated and ingeniously and skilfully devised they may be, they are, in and of themselves—that is, independently of the purpose of winning the game—more or less meaningless.”
With Luigi Benedicenti, a masterful player and skilled creator of virtuosic images that arise from a fabulous chromatic range, are we in a theatre or in an exhibition room? Are we active spectators or passive visitors? Are we playing, or are we being played?
In my view, these are questions that, within themselves, contain more than one answer.
These are beautiful works (according to Crocean standards), as if they were created by a hand deeply rooted in ancient tradition—in the manner of Caravaggio, so to speak. His skilful and intelligent secular reinterpretation of the Cena di Emmaus (where the figures’ faces are struck by light) is more than a Dadaist homage to Caravaggio—it is a playful subversion of more than a few clichés from our daily lives.
In every work, in fact, he is an artist who proves that he knows what he is doing—someone who has internalised the lesson of compositio, which, to quote Leon Battista Alberti, must respect “circumscription,” that is, drawing; “composition,” meaning the perspectival structure; and “reception of light,” that is, the lights, shadows, and colours.
This is precisely the case with the splendid horizontal female nude titled Nel segno dello Scorpione, where, mingling ironically—as in a game between the sacred and the profane—the myth of Narcissus and the sinful myth of an Eva reimagined in Liberty style, she wields a clearly allusive lily.
In every painting or “little theatre” by Luigi Benedicenti, one clearly recognises a unique hand. But beneath the surface, one perceives a composite personality, orchestrating and combining psychological and perceptual moments that are vastly different from one another—one who deliberately renounces any attempt at cathartic solutions to respond to the contradictions of reality.
The works of this artist are thoughtful, uniformly active, historically relevant.
For a moment, with him, one is tempted to believe one has returned to tradition.
A satisfied silence, in this case, from the viewer fulfilled before compositions that are immediately graspable and decodable, with flawless execution—neither perspectively nor chromatically flawed—and revealing an impeccable preparatory drawing.
Freud taught us that art has above all a consolatory function and represents the most precious compensation for the shortcomings of our existence. In this sense, we are gifted, with Dolci riflessi—sweet in the literal sense—with these meringues with whipped cream, not to mention the strawberry pastries, which touch upon childhood chords and memories of festive Sunday meals crowned by the pastry shop box, in an oil-on-panel composition that is aesthetically comforting.
Equally unequivocal is the message of Cartina vuota, a work balanced between the playful and the poignant—and once again, a guilty pleasure indulged only in intention.
Why deny it? Contemporary experimentation sometimes feels like a kind of torture for our eyes and hearts, with its often cryptic language and its use of unusual, even vulgar materials—tins, black rags, greasy surfaces, ropes, newspaper, broken glass.
Let us therefore bless (and forgive the easy play on words—but after all, nomen omen) Benedicenti and his Niveau de remplissage—his jarred mushrooms in oil, a kind of metaphysical still life, bearer of delicious silences.
And to hell with diets.
With Luigi Benedicenti, we spectators can play and delude ourselves, just like at the theatre, that the defeat of ugliness might also mean the defeat of the evils of our lives, and that the gates of Eden may not be closed forever.
His is a virtual theatre, with an aseptic atmosphere, a bit Dada and a bit dandy, where one is constantly provoked and responds, amused, to the author (or to the invisible authors Benedicenti carries with him as part of his cultural heritage) with a liberating round of applause.
But he is also a peintre cruel (a definition that suits him perfectly in the sweet and expressive musicality of the French language), when he delights maniacally in reconstructing Chantilly cream in its most provocative, tempting, allusive, sensual details.
He is a true artist—an alchemist of pure colour, a Pygmalion of semi-Apollonian forms that ooze Dionysian sinfulness from every part—with his cream puffs, his caramelised pears—in a provocatively aesthetic exhibitionism (a truly risqué dessert) that leaves no space for the observer’s reflection, whose only freedom is, alas, to swallow—in vain.
Every detail is calculated by the author to channel our deepest transgressive urges, leaving us exposed to temptation, to our voyeurism as hardened but repressed sinners.
It is complex, if not impossible, to fit these works within any formula tied to a movement or current in modern or contemporary art.
The black background, for instance, is the dominant motif in every panel painting by Benedicenti—a pictorial message repeated again and again, evoking connections with conceptual experimentation.
Black is “like a nothingness without possibility, a dead nothingness after the death of the sun, like an eternal silence, without a future, without even the hope of a future,” as Kandinsky wrote.
Luigi Benedicenti appears to use a cold and objective language rooted in hyperrealism, but in truth, his striking irony presents the narrative poetically (because it is also poetry), asserting his subjectivity.
Thus, I would rather define his technique as hyperillusionistic.
Only in appearance can his message be compared to that of American Pop Art. In fact, as should be remembered, Pop Art confronts—through a puritan lens—the obsessive mass consumerism of this century.
On the contrary, Luigi Benedicenti not only invites consumption but urges indulgence in this bounty, in these sweets, in these pleasure-giving calories, in a Pantagruelian carnival feast.
And the laughter that follows can only be divine.
Torino, 17 February 1998
Paolo Levi
