TIZIANA BOCCI
Writer
An arduous undertaking for this terrestrial babel of ours. The ability to find an effectual language, in common with the events outside and the emotions inside, that is good nourishment for our vital creative Eros: essential for the conscious, serene and satisfying existence of every creature. Creative Eros of which creation is imbibed. Use words, signs, drawings, universal signals, simple and sacred, which we really need to live fully, together, under and within this sky. Giovanna Benzi succeeded in this enterprise! With her “thousand and one clouds” (quotes Emanuela Pulvirenti), she found the effective alphabet: re-designing “signs of life”, saturated in form and colors which, as smoke signals indispensable for communicating at great distances with a language that is unique and understandable to all the different tribal cultures, they come to meet us from the sky to narrate romantic ancient fables. Always current “signs of life” to which we all still want to listen because they nourish the good senses and the sense of beauty.
Contemplating, reading, translating, interpreting, nourished by the clouds stopped in a moment and portrayed through the wonderful artistic skills of Giovanna Benzi, allowed me to flow and dance with the ancient part of me. It was like feeling, re-understanding and giving voice in the present moment, to the empathic transference and sympathetic counter-transfer with my inner and eternal child. Intimate communication between parts of me and the works of art, which I will try to translate with words full of vital meaning, like the clouds that Giovanna Benzi paints. At first I experienced placing myself emotionally face to face with the works of Giovanna, linked to a memory that unites her life with mine: to the amazement and joy of little girls who spend hours looking at the drawings formed by the clouds in the sky, trying to understand the meaning of the story painted in blue. A posture of the DNA of the soul that has turned us into dreamers, differently able to do so, and then women who go through life with an upturned nose ... And I imagined that a little Giovanna, as it was for me, has soon discovered that the clouds talk about terrestrial and extraterrestrial faces, of animals and elves and of Santa Claus, of houses, palaces, and celestial villages, of signs and writings sometimes legible from left to right and sometimes to the contrary ... and of monsters and darkness to be observed at due distance, or only from far away ... In short, a living world, vital and different, distant yet so close to us, which motivated me, as I imagine it, to continue to smell life with eyes and their visions turned and concentrated on the movements of that distant although intimate “beyond”, to grasp the messages of relief and lightness for the earthly bio-species that live in the “here” and “now”. I imagined this inner, psycho-emotional and artistic process, so motivating and productive because it is like the works of the woman Giovanna Benzi the puffy clouds full of “signs of life”, came from the sky to meet, to communicate and to wrap Mother Earth. A land narrated by the artist through majestic rocks, imposing and barren mountains, immense trees and prostheses, sometimes verdant and sometimes completely bare that, in contrast with the light and mobile clouds, are the painting of the total stability and immobility that gravitational heaviness of the infinite “here” and “now”, imposes. Skies so different from those depicted by the “sketches of clouds” of the great romantic masters such as Constable, Turner, Friedrich, men, in which the contact of the sky with the earth in those paintings are non-existent or vaporous and shapeless or boundless and far away. With my transfer, I traveled at first between saturated forms and colors of feminine romanticism (“Le forme del vento”, 2014) rich in orange and blue, like the colors of the chakras needful to give light to a new life. And I landed, then, in that two-dimensionality typical of sacred iconography, which in the work “Connubio” (2018) are illuminated with black and white like the Tao. And, while I was thinking about the connection between the Indo- Vedic-Tantric and Taoist philosophies, the song “Il cielo” by Renato Zero started to play in my head and to accompany memories and reflections. “Quante volte ho guardato al cielo? ... E non c’è pietà per chi non prega, e si convincerà che non è solo una macchia scura, il cielo... quante volte avrei preso il volo ... la presenza di chi è andato già ... Il cielo ...” at that point I asked myself if Giovanna, like so many other existential researchers more or less famous, had received the answers that throughout her life she had continued to search through the art of painting in a monothematic way the “signals of life” that arrived from the sky thanks to water, wind and light. The clouds are water shaped by the wind, and are made enlightened and colored by the light of the solar fire, and they are bearers of distant lands ... The clouds are, par excellence, after the human being, the best figurative and aesthetic synthesis of the integration between the elements that according to oriental medicines produce life ... the clouds are “anatomical” drawings of the heavenly artists, perhaps a bit meteor path, that narrate the existence of winged and vital energies, invisible to the eyes of many and so tangible to some with the vision of the heart ... And then, with intuitive understanding, I imagined that this romantic woman, artist, and teacher, expert in drawing scientific anatomies, has really received important answers and messages through the “signs of life” of the sky and, in addition, as a karmic gift, she felt the need to perform a pleasant task to perform in the “here” and “now”: being able and knowing how to paint and draw “L’oro in cielo” (2015)! Contemplating, reading, translating, interpreting and being nourished by the signs of life that the sky has given to the skills of the eyes, the hands and the artist’s heart of Giovanna Benzi, to “feel” at best, each of us can re-learn to listen, to understand and to communicate through and with significant forms imbued with original life. Those natural energies are full of creative Eros, a bit magical and wise, who do not need to respect the laws of the Vitruvian man embodied in their own bio species. Free to exist, the “signs of life” reach us from above to meet us, to help us, to lift us out of the stable and heaviness of life, suggesting that we remain children and children with their noses turned up, in order to continue to remember of which clear waters, which soft and strong winds, which soft and colored earths, which illuminated and illuminating light we are created with ... despite and beyond earthly events ... And then I heard a single inner voice speak: “A creative teaching very important the one entrusted to the art of Giovanna Benzi ... signs of life to be delivered to those who will be able to look at her artworks with the eyes of the heart”...
And in an instant, “Un angelato” (2017) whispered to me ... “Yes! ... That’s it ...”
