PASQUALE LETTIERI
Art critic
Pablo Picasso used to say “Even a well-painted rose can be revolutionary”. And I ask myself: “And if they were clouds”? The answer is given by the artist from Milan Giovanna Benzi, who made of clouds the unique motif of her pictorial representation. Conceptual or hyperreal works? I would say poetry of love and freedom. And she created with them an empathic relationship, of sentimental exchange, revolutionary in its essentiality. A revolution, understood as an acceleration of time, of changes, not only of common sense, but also of the individual and social awareness, continuous and incomparably complex, of verbal, imaginary and multimedia languages, which more and more resembles a kaleidoscope, where everything succeeds and get stuck with the whole, constituting a universe of signs and signs, which then end up having any code, which revolutions, even if only for a moment, our common sense of perception, or is a new way of feeling, with no return , clearly separating, a beginning from a later. These clouds that are under our eyes, metaphor and speculum of human existence, they touch our senses, with so much soft delicacy, so different from the violence to which we are anthropologically accustomed, that risk to pass unnoticed, while they upset and continue to upset the most consolidated parameters, on which our cognitive paradigms are based, those that allow us to question ourselves and the world, the infinitely small and invisible, which is confirmed as the most reliable source of information concerning us all and the universe under the atoms, until we hypothesize that in this direction we can discover the real origin of the universe and already speak of a forthcoming knowledge of the so-called bricks of God, while the infinitely large and equally invisible is shown more and more like the spreading out vector towards the solar system and towards the intergalactic goals, hypothesizing chronologies of the order of billions of light years and speed that exceed that of light. Admiring the works of Benzi, means understanding that we are like clouds, ready to transform ourselves continuously, even in a physical sense, given the chemical capacity (and today we will also say clinical) to intervene on the form, mitigating or modifying its morphology and varying at the change of weather, adapting our cultural, moral and ethical characteristics so as not to be overwhelmed by the continuous current of events, projects and drifts and to follow the transformations, so as to be always in sync, in sync, which also means in criticism and in disagreement, with what happens, in reality and in the virtual, in order not to be prey to outdated theories, to mythological languages, to ritual rhetoric, all those things that in the past have presided over the birth, growth, decline and death of civilizations and civilizations. Excluding the positions of apocalyptic and integrated, which belong to two dogmatic extremisms, which fail to read the conservations and transformations, as unsurpassable molecularities of material life and its cultural projections, in continuous interaction between the real and the virtual and vice versa, the first ones destined to be swept away by history, the seconds mixed between infrared and ultraviolet, all the other positions, are acceptable and I would say necessary, to cultivate the memories of the past and make them become energies of life, remembering that all innovators, even those today sanctified, were either crazy or heretic and often both. The clouds of Benzi know how to stay together, they are impregnated, they merge, they are courted, they lie down to the sky like in the Pantheon. Pantheon in religion, as a place of mutual recognition in which one can stand next to each other, without annoying each other, without considering diversity as a defect, but as a plus, almost a perfection. A place that summarizes all the places, where it is not necessary to have godparents, it is just important to be there, occupying its own place and respecting that of others, even making it a guarantor. Giovanna Benzi paints the sublime, heir, in her great unspeakable and ineffable container, of the measures of beauty, of expressionist freedom, of emotion, of gestures, of nomadism, of experimentation, of theatricality of the scene, of the secret of a learned laboratory of the great theater that is above us and of its immense celestial vault, disturbing fantastic aura and unsustainable cape, characterized, by the atmospheric of the clouds. They are configured as a large container, formless, elastic, ready to take the form of everything that it contains inside, constantly changing their way of appearing, their transitory morphology, made of all the imperfections and the hesitations that clash when everything is stasis and seems to move, when everything is moving and seems to be stasis.
