curated by Laura Barreca
09 > 10.2005
For the Drawings Cabinet exhibition, Manfredi Beninati publicly presents for the first time the Tarot, a collection of 50 drawn cards, mostly pencil on paper, made between 1999 and 2000. Arranged according to a narrative sequence decided by the artist, the cards are kept inside a Drawings Cabinet, a very secluded and private environment inspired by the wunderkammer (the cabinets of curiosities). Particularly in the Tarot the artist makes use of a clear literary reference, freely drawing inspiration from the narrative structure of The Castle of Crossed Destiniesby Italo Calvino.
In the novel, divided into short stories, relationships and links between characters and stories are born not so much from the symbolic interpretation of each tarot card, as from the identification of the nature of cards and the suggestions produced from their specific sequential arrangement.
In the same way Manfredi Beninati’s Tarot should be read and interpreted as a picture story. The artist’s taste for narration can be appreciated through his extraordinary interweaving of allusions and cultural references, modulated with a repeating syntactical language which connects the work internally. His passion for cinema can be similarly interpreted. What indeed is film, if not a narration of images? Plausible scenes and settings are depicted, from places, rooms and landscapes containing real people (the artist himself, his brother Flavio, his mother Carla), or from pure imagination (portraits of Antonio Ligabue, for example, represent a reoccurring obsession in some of his works).
The canvases, like Manfredi Beninati’s drawings or sculptures are inhabited by characters drawn mostly from family photos, depicted frontally with the eyes looking out, almost meeting those of the spectator.
A brilliant and dazzling light illuminates them from below and, just like the cinema’s projected beam behind spectators’ heads, transforms everything into shadow. As scenic backdrop the artist depicts surreal forest landscapes, the aurora borealis and acid coloured rainbows – a studded surface of small, bright colourful sparks created with dripping techniques. In the margin of some works, names from the Invisible City by Calvino are written, or some other simple inscription traced with an uncertain calligraphy, like notes taken quickly to avoid missing a place or a thought. Yet, whatever the level of surrealism or fictionality, the feelings of involvement and expectation generated are real. Just as real, in fact, as the immediate relationship that the viewer establishes with the life and the personal story of the artist. The depiction of these places is sometimes faded and dusty, just like certain remembrances retrieved by our memories. These places are nothing less than our past, our history – or even better – they are, as Manfredi Beninati loves to define them, the ‘places of the soul’.
Translation by Fergus Liam Boden Cloughley
