TEXTS
THIS IS NOW. A Geographical Guide to Cutting-edge Contemporary Art
MANFREDI BENINATI. SO MANY DETAIL TO SEE, IF WE LINGER AND TAKE THE TIME TO LOOK.
It is so difficult today to be a figurative artist and to be bold enough to pick up a paintbrush, stand before a canvas and try to paint something original, with more than 2000 years of art history, populated by unequalled masters and geniuses, behind us. Let us be clear: it is difficult, if one is conscious of the weight of the past. There are tens of thousands of painters who, without a second thought, paint portraits, landscapes and still life every single day. But if they are intelligent and sensitive they cannot fail to feel the weight and the responsibility to avoid falling into the obvious. The Italian artist, Manfredi Beninati, never falls into the obvious, even though he is essentially a figurative painter using such traditional techniques as oils.
My impression when I first saw this huge untitled painting was that I was faced with a huge negative photograph of an image in which the colours were reversed… READ MORE
ART NOW AND THEN
MANFREDI BENINATI
by Jim Lane
It’s long been a debatable topic: how far can an artist depart from reality before his or her work becomes non-representational? The Surrealists pondered this debate as did the Cubists, and of course, the Abstract Expres-sionists a generation later. The line is “fuzzy,” to say the least. The only way to answer such a nearly rhetorical question is to venture quite near or over the line, or better still, meander back and forth across the line. The Italian painter and installation artist, Manfredi Beninati, does just that, and quite often. Just when you think you see some hint of recognizable content in his work, it slips away. Then, when least expected, as you study what appears to be non-representational piece…whoa, what’s this? A human figure? … READ MORE
THE WHITE REVIEW
INTERVIEW WITH MANFREDI BENINATI
by Lowenna Waters
TIME, MEMORY, THE LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND, MANIFESTATION AND METAMORPHOSIS, RESURGENCE AND COLLAPSE AND THE CRISP CRUST OF SICILIAN PASTRY: ALL ELEMENTS OF THE PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, SCULPTURES AND INSTALLATIONS OF MANFREDI BENINATI.
(…) There is in Beninati’s work a manifest tension between serenity and anxiety. The works have an emotional power which harks back to the landscape of memory that links our childhood, adolescence and present.
THE WHITE REVIEW — You have described the process of working on thirty to forty drawings at a time as ‘an organisation of the imagination’? … READ MORE
SACRED DISORDER
by Sergio Risaliti
“YOU DON’T MAKE ART, YOU FIND IT.” (Charles Simic)
(…) a series of new works: paintings, sculptures, photos, bronzes, lightboxes, plaster bas-reliefs and assemblages. The display strategy Beninati has adopted to attract and seduce the viewer works like this: changes of scene, of rhythm, of materials, of light, of iconography and so forth. Variety comes up trumps: the desire to amaze and to enchant, to delightfully intrigue and fascinate. For Beninati art is an initiatic, Orphic experience. Art is to be found in the street, in the folds of the unconscious, on the shelves of the collective memory: it is a moment of grace, of illumination. The artist becomes a seer and a clairvoyant, a shaman and an alchemist. Each room is part of a succession of metamorphoses. Beninati has a remarkable mastery over the means and the techniques and – in the best Italian tradition – the flaunted nonchalance should not deceive. In the design and in the execution he mingles fury and concentration, frenzy and meditation. He manipulates the painting in procedures that are slow and/or rhapsodic; the same happens with sculpture.
Each photograph is constructed slowly: the actual shot is preceded by a long process of constructing and organising the set. In his youth Beninati worked in cinema, where he became familiar with set design and film editing. He succeeds in giving an air of naturalness even to the disorder of an artist’s studio. On exhibit here is an alternation and succession of differences and thematic leaps, of contrasts and linguistic diversities, and at the same time of analogies, resemblances and formal correspondences, signs and images that move transversally from one room to the next, from one material to another. The intimate, hermetic settings of the luminous photos, with their nocturnal atmosphere redolent of seventeenth-century Nordic painting, are far removed from the fantastical world of the plaster bas-reliefs. Here the screenplay is not entirely rational, and yet nor is it entirely random. There is an astute dosage of improvisation and design, of extemporaneity and planning. When painting matter he knows how to leave the hand free. … READ MORE
TO THINK OF SOMETHING
Sorcha Carey on Manfredi Beninati
(…) Freud often likened the human subconscious to a collection of ancient artefacts preserved in a tomb, waiting to be discovered and interpreted by an archaeologist. Beninati’s buried interiors too speak the language of archaeology and the subconscious. Like the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, they reveal the remains of domestic life perfectly preserved in all its minutiae; and cast the viewer as archaeologist, rewarding the senses with the thrill of discovery, and inviting us to uncover the stories preserved in his objects. Beninati’s installations make sense in the way that dreams do. They momentarily transport us somewhere palpably real. It’s only in recounting the detail (such as a tropical sunset in Liverpool) that we realise that we had stumbled upon a dream world, where reality was refracted through the prism of subconscious memory and fictional invention. … READ MORE
THE NEW YORKER
“Goings On About Town: Manfredi Beninati”, in The New Yorker, 13 March 2007
A collection of candy-colored paintings veil landscapes and familiar-seeming interiors with drips, agate stripes, and aurora-borealis glows. They’re dreamy and lovely, like looking at the world through a rainbow prism. In the front, an installation depicts what seems to be a therapist’s office gone to seed, with years of repressed desperation finally popping out. The surrounding set is perfectly plausible (radiator, worn paperbacks on a shelf, swivelly office chairs, wallpaper), but the desk has been taken over by a turretted sandcastle, with an empty wine bottle and a full ashtray nearby. Wonder abounds. … READ MORE
CONTEMPORARY ANNUAL 2006
“MANFREDI BENINATI”
by Nicholas Cullinan
The paintings, collages, sculptures and installations of Manfredi Beninati recall rich repositories of memory, both real and imagined. Beninati, born in Palermo but now resident near Rome, infuses his works with intermingling stratas of nostalgia, melancholy and decay.
Some of his paintings and drawings derive their titles from the imaginary cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Kahn in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. While Calvino’s interpretation of Marco Polo manipulates memory by basing all of the narrator’s fantastic voyages to exotic metropolises solely on Venice, Beninati also explores in his works the blurry line between remembering and forgetting, truth and fiction. … READ MORE
THE VILLAGE VOICE
“BEST IN SHOW: MANFREDI BENINATI”
by R.C. Baker
Look through a glass door to a living room where a sandcastle has colonized a tabletop—this complex of crenellated walls, turrets, and curving staircases is so large that it continues onto a plywood sheet cantilevered over a chair. The ghostly frames of missing pictures mark the striped wallpaper, though a bucolic lake scene, an oceanscape, and some old-fashioned photographic portraits have been left hanging. The floor is strewn with sand and discarded cigarettes, wine bottles, coffee cups, and take-out food containers, as if some adult has tried to re-create the memory of a wondrous day at the beach in the midst of this curtained, melancholy room. … READ MORE
NEGOTIATING REALITY
Manfredi Beninati: “Viva L’Italia Aglaura”
by Matthew J. Westerby
The colorfully intense landscape of Manfredi Beninati’s painting Viva L’Italia Aglaura recalls an all-encompassing dream. As a former film director, Beninati knows how to frame a scene to evoke the eccentricities of time and place, lending a surreal quality to his paintings. The painting inextricably confuses time and place, and the panorama layers figures of children and animals scaled down to miniature. The canvas boldly presents a nursery of hodgepodge reality. The opaque membrane between foreground and background obscures the lines between fiction and reality. Anchored at the top of the composition, mustard yellow streamers frame the dreamscape like a proscenium arch, adding a sense of theatricality to the painting. Color is washed across the hazy background, stippled onto the decorative trees, and dripped down the color-saturated canvas surface. … READ MORE
FLASH ART (Sept 06)
“MANFREDI BENINATI”
by Francesco Stocchi
In Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy, we are taken by the hand and guided into the realm of the abstract, the subconscious and the immaterial. It is the visionary but prophetic story, if we think of modern artistic language, of a young man who has the talent for creating dreams and selling them to those who are looking for them, thus getting the sustenance that would permit him to dream again. The stories that make up the film are written and interpreted by the greatest dreamers of our time, characters who, by charging the object with paradox, sentiment and irony, came face to face with universal themes and helped to ponder new issues that had not yet been considered. Today these are fundamental considerations, which did not exist before then. … READ MORE
MADE UP ON THE TELEGRAPH
THE 5TH LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL IS A GIDDY FINALE TO LIVERPOOL’S STINT AS EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE, SAYS RICHARD DORMENT.
by Richard Dorment
(…) Even so, some of the pieces I liked most are best seen at night. To view the installation by Italian Manfredi Beninati you have to look through a window punched through the wall of a derelict building in the city centre. Standing there in the cold and dark, you are confronted with a vision of complete human happiness — a brightly lit drawing room with comfortable sofa and chairs, carpets, books, flowers, and a view through the window onto a tropical sunset. Newspapers and toys, a dolls’ house, and the tools dad is using to build a toy theatre lie scattered on the floor. But just as you are taking all this in, something moves and for the first time you notice the sinister figure looking in at the scene from the other the direction.
It takes a split second to realise that what you are seeing is your own reflection in the mirror hanging on the back wall. Beninati neatly demonstrates what it must be like to be on the outside looking in – to see comfort, warmth, love, and security but not to be a part of it. Wonderful.
Almost next door, the witty Japanese duo Atelier Bow Wow have constructed… READ MORE
LIVERPOOL UNLEASHED
by Richard Cork (Financial Times, 11 October 2008)
(…) Nor is Kusama alone in her determination to convey acute disquiet. The further I went in my exploration of the biennial, the more unnerving it became. On Renshaw Street, Manfredi Beninati invites us to pause in front of a grubby, poster-choked wall and peer through a dark gap. I had to press my nose right up against the glass before making out the living room within. Although empty, signs of its occupants could be seen everywhere. Breakfast remains lay abandoned on a table, while children’s drawings were strewn across the carpet. All this normality, however, was contradicted by a bizarre view of a tropical sunset flaring through a distant window. And suddenly, I glimpsed my own reflection in a mirror, staring into the room like a seedy voyeur bent on disrupting family life. … READ MORE
ARTS-UP
INTERVIEW AVEC MANFREDI BENINATI. PAR JEAN-PAUL GAVARD-PERRET
– Qu’est-ce qui vous fait lever le matin?
Le besoin de me faire un café
– Que sont devenus vos rêves d’enfant?
Ils ont grandi avec moi
– A quoi avez-vous renoncé?
A la mortalité sereine
– D’où venez-vous?
D’un instant d’idiotie de mes parents
– A qui n’avez-vous jamais osé écrire?
A moi, je m’épouvanterais
– Qu’est-ce qui vous distingue des autres artistes?
La concentration … READ MORE
EXPANDER
by JJ Charlesworth
Manfredi Beninati’s work explores the theme of life’s journey – a well-trodden path of art and literature which Beninati obscures with outbursts of paint. Figures are partially glimpsed at the edge of a forest, on a road, by the sea; they are in non-places that echo the internal weather of moods or the receding mists of memory. Like adolescence, the paintings are cocktails of anxiety and security, of clear figurative imagery overlaid with nonsensical, painterly noise. … READ MORE
TEMA CELESTE
INTERVIEW WITH MANFREDI BENINATI
by Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Cullinan: I’ve read that one influence on your work is Italo Calvino’s ‘Le città invisibili’, in which Marco Polo describes to Kublai Kahn all the cities he has visited, but whose memories are actually based on just one – Venice. Do your paintings recall real or imaginary places?
Manfredi Beninati: Calvino is just a great writer so he has certainly somehow influenced me as a person (therefore all that comes from me), though I wouldn’t say he was a major source of learning and understanding. As a matter of fact, I don’t see in my imagery any elements that can be traced back to his work. I just enjoy reading his books. … READ MORE
A long conversation with Raimundas Malasauskas
What follows is the first of three conversations on the same subject between Raimundas Malasauskas and Manfredi Beninati that took place on the 4th of February 2011 while the two of them stood in front of a random painting at Manfredi’s studio in Palermo for over an hour. Raimundas recorded the conversation on his mobile phone. Later on somebody transcribed the whole thing word by word. It is here presented just the way it came out of th recording without any editing being done to it. It is perhaps more interesting from a psychoanalytic point of view than it might be from artistic one. … READ MORE
ESFERA CRITICA
ENTREVISTA CON MANFREDI BENINATI
de Gema Melgar
ESFERA CRITICA: En declaraciones en su reciente inauguración de Dicembre 2039 dice “Desde los comienzos de mi carrera artística he hecho cosas para mí mismo, cuadros y esculturas que no tenía la intención de mostrar en ninguna parte…” Según tengo entendido, parte de estos cuadros ‘privados’ conforman esta exposición, ¿que le hizo cambiar de idea y mostrarlos? … READ MORE
MALINCONICO BENINATI. DIPINTI SOSPESI NEL TEMPO
di Linda de Sanctis
Bisogna restare a lungo immobili davanti alla tela per scoprire cosa si cela dentro un quadro di Manfredi Beninati: dal colore luminoso di questi ultimi lavori, in mostra alla galleria Lorcan O’Neill, affiorano, come da un lontano ricordo, donne e bambini, e un cielo popolato da dischi volanti, aerei, razzi. … READ MORE
“TO THINK OF SOMETHING” PEERS INTO ANOTHER WORLD
CHRISTOPHER BROWN IN METRO LONDON.
This year’s Biennial is at its best when you stumble across things you were not expecting. During the day, you could easily walk past Manfredi Beninati’s piece without even realising it’s there.
A small panel indicates its existence but, surrounded by posters, it doesn’t stand out. The crowds of people that gather around to peer inside are the only giveaway. (…)
Looking in and behind the facade of the abandoned building, you’ll see the living room of, what looks like, an affluent family’s apartment. Toys and painting materials lie around the carpet as if they’ve been recently abandoned and a door is slightly ajar at the back, showing a dining room.
It feels as if you’re peering into a different world and, though this could effectively be nosing around somebody else’s home, the unoccupied room is so homely that it doesn’t feel voyeuristic or uncomfortable.
The fashions used help to reinforce the impression of peering into somebody’s childhood. It’s a pleasant and rewarding experience during the day, when you have to work hard to see everything through the sun’s glare… READ MORE
LA BIENNALE
TOBIAS VERLENDE IS IN VENICE
(…) Among all these wonderful works in the numerous pavilions, there are three artists that deserve a special mention. One of these is the absolutely installation of the artist Manfredi Beninati in the Italian pavilion – titled Prendere appunti per un sogno da iniziare di pomeriggio e continuare la notte (e che non si cancella al risveglio) – from 2005. One could easily miss this work, since it’s hidden behind a dirty, old mirror in the corner of a small room. I saw many visitors who just looked at the “mirror” or “old painting” and then went on to the next piece of art. I admit that this could have also happened to me but the visitor before me put his face so close to the “mirror” that I assumed there must be something behind it. If you move very close, you will get a glance of the fantastic installation which is in a hidden room only seen through the painting. The room is an old living room from a different time, a forgotten world. The viewer gets the feeling of peeking into a secret room that has not been entered in a long time and the mystery in all of the objects around. … READ MORE
ARTFORUM (2013)
MANFREDI BENINATI AT GALLERIA LORCAN O’NEILL
by Pier Paolo Pancotto
The summer of 2003 was exceedingly hot in Rome, the air heavy, motionless, as if it were hostage to the sun and its scorching rays. This was a fitting context for the debut of a young artist hailing from the heat of Palermo, in southern Italy: Manfredi Beninati, who had recently moved to the Italian capital. Thinking back to that scalding and indolent summer, one can still easily recall Beninati’s early paintings and their reception: From the start, his work was endowed with a special quality determined by its ability to suspend traditional concepts of time and space. The artist still plays freely with these fundamental dimensions of thought through graphic and chromatic iterations of personal, historical, literary, and cinematographic memories. … READ MORE
IL TEMPO IN UNA STANZA
by Valentina Bruschi (Il Foglio)
NELLE INSTALLAZIONI DI MANFREDI BENINATI RIVIVONO RICORDI DELL’INFANZIA, SOGNI, VIAGGI. VEDERLI È COME SBIRCIARE DAL BUCO DELLA SERRATURA. L’ULTIMA OPERA AL MACRO DI ROMA. LA PRIMA DELLE SUE CAMERE, CHE GLI VALSE IL PREMIO DEL PUBBLICO ALLA BIENNALE DEL 2005, È ORA NELLA COLLEZIONE PERMANENTE DEL MAXXI.
Ricordi d’infanzia, sogni e viaggi nel tempo. Le stanze di Manfredi Beninati sono allestite con grande attenzione ai minimi dettagli e ricreate a grandezza naturale: il pubblico non può entrarvi ma solo osservarne i particolari e percepirne l’atmosfera, da una piccola finestra chiusa. L’invenzione di questi ambienti come forme d’arte contemporanea ha reso celebre l’artista palermitano, classe 1970, che nel 2005 s’è aggiudicato il premio del pubblico alla 51esima Biennale di Venezia. E con questo riconoscimento ha vinto anche una scommessa, quella di diventare artista visivo, lanciata cinque anni prima con il fratello Flavio. … READ MORE
AUS KüNSTLERSICHT
13 QUESTIONS TO BENINATI FROM DR. BASTIAN
1. What is art?
This is how I answered the first time somebody asked the same question. I just found it in my hard disc and tought it would be interesting to compare it with my new point of view (at that time I only had one or two years experience in the art world):
“Dear Mustafa’, you asked me to write a few words on art (“my” art? Boh!) and, well, I have to say that I’m not too good at writing since painting and drawing is all I’’ve been up to lately, like most people in my business, I guess. I have to try and guess it because I don’t know that many artists and hardly spend time with the few ones I know and whenever I do we hardly talk about art. … READ MORE
ARTFORUM 2005
CRITIC’S PICKS: MANFREDI BENINATI
For his second solo show at Lorcan O’Neill Gallery, Manfredi Beninati has filled the space with nostalgia, color, and beauty. What unites the Sicilian artist’s paintings, sculptures, and collages (as well as his current installation at the Venice Biennale, in which visitors peer through a small, dirty window at what looks like an abandoned eighteenth-century drawing room) is a controlled chaos, an oscillation between poetry and technical rigor. In his new show, anecdotes from the artist’s childhood are interwoven with religious visions, fairy tale characters, and Italian literary references. … READ MORE
Manfredi Beninati: The Painter of Dreamland
Laura Barreca for NY Arts
Manfredi Beninati’s painting is informed by cinema, photography and literature and, through it, he shows us the world of personal memory. Historically speaking, the artist’s paintings, installations and sculptures refer to the so-called “theatricalization” of visual arts, developed into international artistic production during the last 50 years. Artists such as Robert Wilson, Vito Acconci and Tadeusz Kantor used to avail themselves of theatrical scenes for their performances. They used real sets, whose fundamental elements like light, architecture and scenery also contributed greatly to the development of contemporary figurative painting. … READ MORE
TEMA CELESTE (2007)
“MANFREDI BENINATI”
by Julie Cirelli
Prior to the opening of this exhibition, Manfredi Beninati locked himself in the gallery’s anteroom for days with a self-proclaimed “sand castle expert” from Long Island, hired after a google search. The two of them created a massive castle complete with towers and spiraling staircases, on the site of an otherwise ordinary home-office scene. the collision of two usually dichotomous landscapes – we are in a location wherein the parallel workplaces of the child and the adult for once intersect – lays the framework for Beninati’s favored motif: the gross, banal, adult terrain eclipsed by nostalgia for the bright and mystical imaginary world of childhood. Rather singularly, … READ MORE
NY ARTS
“Manfredi Beninati: Flavio and Palermo”
by Mary Hrbacek
In his new paintings, Beninati employs soft, luminous colors to create dreamlike visions of a world suffused with feelings of fantasy and nostalgia. The artist dissolves the boundaries between magical interiors and natural exteriors by filling the interiors with bouquets of flowers and vegetation. Outdoor spaces fairly reek of the beauty created by natural phenomena like aurora borealis, where particles from space stream through the earth’s stratosphere in brightly colored, nocturnal bursts of light. Beninati transforms conventional architectural structures into mysterious imaginative spaces by constructing rivers and hills of rainbow-colored lines that penetrate through palatial rooms where elegant furnishings recede into light-filled mist. The viewer is seduced by visions of the luxurious ease found in a Mediterranean culture of another time. … READ MORE
FLASH ART (Sett 06)
“MANFREDI BENINATI”
di Francesco Stocchi
Piombando nell’astratto, nel subconscio e nell’immateriale veniamo guidati per mano da Hans Richter nel suo Dreams That Money Can Buy: la storia visionaria, ma veggente se si pensa al linguaggio artistico moderno, di un giovane che ha l’abilità di creare sogni e venderli a chi ne cerca, trovando un sostentamento che gli permetta di sognare di nuovo. Le storie che compongono il film vengono scritte e interpretate dai più grandi sognatori del suo tempo, figure che caricando l’oggetto di paradosso, sentimento e ironia, hanno affrontato tematiche universali, aiutando a riflettere su nuove problematiche ancora non prese in considerazione. … READ MORE
ARTNEWS
REVIEWS: MANFREDI BENINATI
by Jonathan Turner
Manfredi Beninati is one of only four Italian artists included in the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale (through the 6th of this month); as such, his paintings, collages, and sculptures are under close scrutiny in Italy.
This talented young artist from Palermo emerged on the scene only recently, and in his second solo show in Rome, he continues to address childhood, memory, and nostalgia. His reference points are extremely personal, and he draws from a variety of Italian sources, such as the vivid expressionism of the early-20th-century painter Antonio Ligabue and the intense literary reflections of Italo Calvino. … READ MORE
L’EPOS 2018
Today – and today only – by visiting the 2nd floor at n. 25 of via Dante in Palermo, one had the opportunity to physically enter one of the most exquisitely decadent artistic imaginaries of our time, that of Manfredi Beninati. As in Huysmans’ À Rebours, the dream of reality replaces reality itself in a sort of hallucination in which we are made aware of the mental experiences of a Beninati-Des Esseintes. Referring to it simply as an “installation” would be misleading: it was one of the most gratifying aesthetic experiences in recent times. … READ MORE
ARTMOCO
The otherworldly nature of Sicilian Manfredi Beninati’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. These 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”. Does anyone remember the magic of The Water Babies?
(ARTMOCO, 2005)
UOVO #13
“MANFREDI BENINATI. NOTES FOR A DREAM. ARTIST ON A BET (AND PAINTER IN PASSING)”
by Norma Mangione
NM: When you paint, you use photographs of your childhood or your relatives. What precisely is the relationship between painting and photography?
MB: If there is a figure, a person in the painting, it is usually copied from a photograph because I think it is important for it to be exactly as I see it. The rest is painting. This may make use of fragments, things I see. Like maybe now I see those flowers and then later I put them in a painting in the studio. It’s a chance to organize the imagination. … READ MORE
SEGNI E SOGNI. TRA REALTÀ E INCONSCIO
Sergio Risaliti su Arte Mondadori, marzo 2016
UNA PITTURA VISIONARIA E DAI COLORI NERVOSI, IN CUI INTRICATI PAESAGGI ONIRICI ACCOLGONO E CONFONDONO LE CRONACHE ESSENZIALI DELL’ARTISTA SICILIANO
Ho trascorso una piacevole serata con Manfredi Beninati (Palermo, 1970) in una trattoria poco fuori Firenze. Mi ha raccontato episodi della sua vita fornendomi informazioni utili a capire meglio il suo lavoro. Fin da ragazzo si è spostato in giro per il mondo, ha cambiato casa, si è trasferito in diverse città, in Italia e all’estero. Tutto questo girovagare lo ha di fatto obligato a vivere tra euforia per il nuovo e nostalgia del passato. Palermo e Los Angeles, Roma e Buenos Aires, naturalmente Londra. Forse è per questa ragione che vive tra stati emotivi opposti: tra accelerazione del battito cardiaco e rallentamento psichico fino alla sospensione del giudizio. Il volto si accende per la curiosità e la sorpresa che un evento scatena, poi si incupisce improvvisamente; Beninati va in “pause”, rapito da chi sa quale ricordo, portato via e lontano dalla nostalgia. Come direbbe Michelangelo Buonarroti: la malinconia è la sua “allegrezza”. … READ MORE
EXIBART – 2005
INTERVISTA CON MANFREDI BENINATI
di Lavinia Filippi
Ha esordito meno di due anni fa da Lorcan O’Neill a Roma. Nei suoi oli il disegno emerge da atmosfere oniriche ed i personaggi si perdono in astratte macchie di colori. E il giovane palermitano è già presente nella collezione permanente del MAXXI, alla Quadriennale di Roma, ed è vincitore del premio per la giovane arte italiana 2004-2005. Lo abbiamo incontrato a Venezia durante i sopralluoghi per la sua prima Biennale…
Come sei diventato “artista”? Con la pittura è stato colpo di fulmine? Alcuni tuoi quadri ricordano una certa fotografia ritoccata di fine Ottocento. Non hai mai avuto dubbi sulla scelta del medium per la tua ricerca? … READ MORE
CONVERSATION BETWEEN MANFREDI AND LORENZO
(Toll of bells, one stroke. Music)
LP: Let’s talk about Tiziano.
MB: Tiziano who?
LP: Ha! Tizianoooooo Ferro…? No…
MB: Tiziano Ferro… I don’t like him… no, actually he’s good, he’s good
LP: What about Tiziano the artist?
MB: Tizianoooo Sclavi?
LP: Ahaha…
MB: Tiziano Vecellio. … READ MORE
RITRATTO D’ARTISTA
di Giuseppe Frangi
Chiamarlo pittore è del tutto limitante. Manfredi Beninati, palermitano, è una specie di vulcano creativo. Un uomo che è transitato attraverso tutte le discipline, partendo dal cinema da cui ha mosso i primi passi, come assistente alla regia di Damiano Damiani e approdando, come confessa, alla narrativa che lo sta catturando in questi ultimi tempi. … READ MORE
ATP DIARY
INTERVISTA CON MANFREDI BENINATI
di Elena Bordigon
La mostra di Manfredi Beninati si apre con la misteriosa data di un giorno nel futuro, “ Domenica 10 dicembre 2039”. Un punto, spiega sintetico l’artista, una giornata immaginaria indefinibile e inspiegabile. L’indeterminatezza è sempre stata una caratteristica della creazione artistica, la sua nota affascinante, oserei direi senza esagerazioni. Così come è impossibile spiegare le motivazioni, le scelte compiute, frutto di scoperte, rivelazioni o casualità. … READ MORE
CAGLIARI ART MAGAZINE
INTERVISTA A MANFREDI BENINATI
di Francesco Cogoni
FC: Quando e come nasce il tuo percorso artistico?
MB: Da bambino guardando le immagini dei libri di arte, da adulto quasi trentenne (dicembre 1999) per una scommessa con mio fratello Flavio un mesetto più tardi dovetti mettermi a fare l’artista.
FC: Quali persone, artisti ed episodi hanno influenzato maggiormente il tuo lavoro? … READ MORE