Maurizio Benetti was born in 1946
in Venezia on the Giudecca's Island. Actually he lives in Friuli in Porcia.
He feeds his passion for painting with the devoted practice. He uses skills
learnt from great venetian masters during years of studying. The humility
of those masters was the fundamental value he learnt and made his own. He
was delighted by their works. They painted outdoors hour by hour to portray
the ancient glories of Venezia.
Curator's Advice:
Into the wide repertoire of Maurizio
Benetti's painting, this picture is a part of a cycle that represents the
most mature aspect of his expression. Generally artists seek safety in nature
and so the naturalistic content of this picture is what conviced me the most
beside the dualistic meaning that it suggests.
In addition to the great tribute
that Benetti does to the Dominante Venezia, the escape from blocks of prospective
and gemoetry takes place and it reach the ancestral painting. He seems to
research the essence of pure expression itself that goes beside the form
and gives space to instinct to gesture to the moving strenght of colour.
Here there is a turning point and
nature necessary becomes the interlocutor and the ispirer of artist's
emotionality. The artist faces the mistery of dualism. This is an aspect
very much explored from humans which is looking for vindication of his existence
into signs of nature.
Good and evil, awful and beauty,
peace and war, willpower and nihilism, whole and nothing, day and night,
dark and light; they are only some examples of the diatribes that excited
and excite yet a lot of minds. Dualism is an issue that has effects on religion
on politics and can influence the destiny of a lot.
The artist does not use the positivist
practice. Instead he adopts the language of instinct of mood and emotivity
of colour and of the lively and full-blooded perception, maybe romantic but
with the expressionist biting rage that lives in the gesture apart into contents.
I glimpse the highlights of the
sea and the air into the whirling and disjointed semantic sequences; when
night and day last the same. Night and day are the same even if they are
asymmetrical. This way they carry out a dilemma which has no response. There
is the balance when everything is open, maybe also the ethics. The artist
tries and wants the ethics and this open mood is in contrast with the whole
that is going to the maximum entropy. The artist is in that turmoil. The
balance is what he is going to fight periodically. |
