Work
Beninati's paintings and drawings often seem to lack subject and order: through the use of stratification, he seeks a non-hierarchical balance in which all the objects are portrayed on the same plane. Be it a household interior or an imaginary landscape, every sort of setting has the same value and becomes a chance to seek new order. Thanks to his fluid brushstrokes, the artist plays with color gradations and glazes to recreate a rarefied, and sometimes unreal, atmosphere, describing figures that seem to slowly emerge from an often dreamlike, imaginary background. Beninati's pictorial production is intrinsically bound to installations that appear to be deserted sets, spaces that are often inaccessible and that the viewer can only observe through cracks or darkened glass (Venice Biennale 2005, XV Quadriennale of Rome 2008), soliciting a sort of voyeurism which violates the private sphere and the indefiniteness of memory. The artist works elaborate, through drawings, oil colours and installations, fragments of an inner world, with literary and artistic references. Beninati is part of the younger generation of painters, and he makes pictures in a style that plugs right into the international contemporary aesthetic. He is the kind of artist who a lot of younger people 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.
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.
The otherworldly nature of this Sicilian artist's soft focus dreamscapes is reminiscent of a childhood of fairytales. Beninati's figurative works reflect a state of innocence that exists behind the subtlety of pastels and candy colours. His paintings depicting children surrounded by flora and fauna seen through layers of light and softly applied colour have been described as "somewhere between Bosch, Renoir and Thomas Kinkead".
The work of this prolific (and skilful) painter orbits around memories of childhood and adolescence. The images are dreamy, sometimes verging on nightmarish, with some details rendered with great precision while others are left out of focus, seemingly smudged out. This is a quality both dreams and memories have in common and it is one which is pleasant and worrying at the same time - it gives these works a certain magnetism.
Read more about this topic: Manfredi Beninati
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount of hard work is too severe for it.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)