GRAZIELLA MELANIA GERACI
Art critic
A light that creates and decomposes shapes, iridescent colors capable of transforming soft entities into abstract spots, molds or sudden eruptions. These are the precious elements of a stylistic game that Giovanna Benzi applies to imaginary landscapes, places of the soul that reveals itself. Like Monet, the artist seems to analyze the chromatic variations on the same element. Her clouds are never identical to themselves as the sheaves of the French Impressionist are not, a meticulous study that amplifies the vibrations of the bright dust and determines the subjects and their presence on lumpy or shiny backgrounds. The boundless openings on these modern baroque skies open windows to inner swirls, the space of the canvas takes on mirror-like values of a repertoire that seems to draw from an atavistic register of seventeenth-century Venetian flashes, however it is almost photographic cut that determines the contemporaneousness of Benzi’s painting. The extreme verticality appear as an under upward that enhance the illusory perspective and magnify the focus of the visual story. Hidden behind the clouds the stars reveal themselves covered with a thick blanket that leaves only a reverberation, the subjects become containers of emotions, abstract boxes belonging to a personal universe. Sometimes the works of the Milanese artist define the flow of time in a lively bustle that animates and enlivens the composition, but can also take strict and austere tones at the end of a unique and universal moment. Exploring Benzi’s many coloristic discoveries, we perceive how much the elaborate language that she encodes is the access to the knowledge of ancestral archetypes and of ancestral memories. Between faint flares and gloomy darkness an ambiguous reality advances, made of fictitious perspectives and ephemeral appearances that open a path to the possibility of unambiguous reading. The materialization of unconscious impulses and instincts seem to exorcise the prevarication on the soul that remains, although surrounded by lightness and opacity, luminous, ready to lightly welcome liberation. The signs unfold thin as wires that enclose color while the backgrounds appear opulent and at the same time liquid, almost impalpable in transparent veils. The stories of Giovanna Benzi narrate through the shady and changing clouds, of a world that flows through space but that seems timeless, eternal in its flow and always similar to itself. The infinite facets duplicate and multiply, in a continuous articulation, the construction of a rhythm from the opposite proceeding, between superficiality and depth, which nevertheless manages to favor the creation of the artwork, followed by a strengthening of the relationship with the user who perceives its centripetal force to then be catapulted to the origin of things, to total abstraction, to the journey towards himself in a continuous questioning whose landing is the cancellation of references objective. Natural manifestations appear as people, as fragments of life, as knots of existence in a process of constant transformation, they are objects and subjects so charming that it is impossible to escape.
