Interrogative works, which seem made not to be understood and which instead ask for interpretation. These are the thirty protagonists of Self-portrait at workthe first major museum retrospective of the artist Elisabetta Benassi (Rome, 1966).
The white cube, in dim light, of the exhibition contributes to lowering the artist’s works into a problematic dimension: a broken process which nevertheless aims to mend a rhizomatic semantic linearity. Although some works are voluntarily hidden by some modular structures in alpha plaster, brutalist in stylebuilt by her sister Ilaria.
The art of Elisabetta Benassi
Benassi’s attention, between the 2000s and today, has focused on a range of different and yet linked themes a cognitive ambivalence of charm, in a sort of way stream of consciousness. Atanthropology and to historyLook The Dry Salvagesan installation of bricks made with flood debris in the Polesine, presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale. And so too All I remember (2010 – ongoing), a series of watercolor descriptions of agency photoswhich the artist removes from vision.
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Elisabetta Benassi’s new works at MACRO
The most recent installations Fixator, Centurio senex(2024) e The Sovereign, Individual(2018), seem to address that sense of estrangement which, like a pendulum, now touches thefuturistic archaeologyNow biomorphism in cast form. In fact, in one case it is an oversized reproduction of the fractured skull of a bat, in the other it is three large artificial trees, involved in a social reflection regarding neo-liberal thought.
Elisabetta Benassi’s exhibition in Rome
Some huge carpets sewn by the artist and lying on the ground, recalling Boetti, they then talk about the disorientated and disorientating condition of finding themselves out of context. Not in a comfortable home, but in the disturbing desert of a museum room, in which, by contrast, there are also two red motor hoes. One from 2016, the other from ’21 from the OFFICINE MECCANICHE BENASSI brand. A pair of objet trouvé that gives the retrospective its title.
The video works in particular can be attributed to the most dizzying and alienating conceptual Day’s End, (2000). An anarchitectural intervention by the undisputed master Gordon Matta Clarck echoes in the title. Filmed in an elevator of the Empire State Building, the film documents a movement of physical and metaphorical ascension up to the 84th floor of the building, culminating in a flash of white light. (The work came out a few months before the attack on the Twin Towers).
There semiotic machine that Benassi builds – in the personal idea that an exhibition is more important than a single work – is open and at the same time centrifugal, as if each component wanted to escape any relationship of dependence on the original nucleus of thought, without succeeding.
Just like his significant installation La vie à crédit (2006). A motorized mechanism equipped with a steel tip that endlessly carves imperfect circles on a wooden support, consuming it and defunctionalizing itself.
Francesca de Paolis
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