MARCELLO PALMINTERI
Curator
The meteorological researcher would find in Giovanna Benzi’s artwork a curious phenomenological inventory on which to draw up variable forecasts. It is likely to believe that those who study clouds deal with a science that more than any other winks at poetry. Not surprisingly, among the observers of clouds, a prominent figure is Luke Howard (pharmacist with a passion for meteorology) that in 1802 classified for simplification the various forms of clouds: Cirrus, Cumulus and Stratus, from which we get all the modifications, composed and intermediate, writing about all this in the “Essay on the modification of clouds”, which proved to be very useful for the understanding of atmospheric phenomena. Contemplating the mutability of the clouds, his system allowed the aerial nature to maintain its charm, preserving the beauty of the sky, as well as the dynamic aspects of its mystery not intact by a decisive progress towards clarity and scientific truth1. Its not a coincidence that the work of Howard had wide echo not only among scholars, but also among artists of all kind: among these, John Constable (who dedicated to the clouds numerous works, interpreters of a nature that could be at the same time a sweet mother and terrible stepmother), Percy Bysshe Shelley (The cloud, 1820), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe who to Howard - and the clouds - will devote more than a script. And if in the scientific field, from Howard until today many things have changed, thanks to the intervention of technology, the charm and the falling in love that pervades our eyes to heaven remain unchanged. Giovanna Benzi knows this very well and draws the protagonists of her paintings from the aerial suggestions. Thus are born works in which the clouds are portrayed as moving sculptures, shaped by the winds: metamorphic bodies whose ineffability counterpoised with the energy and violence of which they are capable. However, the works of Giovanna Benzi do not live on dramatic tensions, rather they look for spaces of mystical light, glimpsed now between transparent skies, now hidden like crows among black vapors. Visions that the artist contemplates along a solitary iter, out of the paths traced, intent on recovering a luminosity pursued as a glimpse of quiet stillness, to offer to those who have lost their meaning. This emotional participation makes it possible to direct her poetics not towards a vacuous spectacle but towards a scenography of color that opens to the spirit suggestions of lyrical contemplation, acting on a conscience that is articulated by complex structures: not evasion towards enchantment but intimate adhesion to feeling, anguish, joy, doubt. So this painting escapes from academicism, turning not only to the pupil but involving the spectator in the thickening of whites and blues, in the splendor of the yellows and gold, in the clumping of the blacks, so they get lost in landscapes of desire from which returning to the ground is like falling into a dream to wake up, in bed, sweating.
