"Best in Show: Manfredi Beninati", in The Village Voice, February 23, 2007

By R.C. Baker

Look through a glass door to a living room where a sandcastle has colonized a tabletop—this complex of crenellated walls, turrets, and curving staircases is so large that it continues onto a plywood sheet cantilevered over a chair. The ghostly frames of missing pictures mark the striped wallpaper, though a bucolic lake scene, an oceanscape, and some old-fashioned photographic portraits have been left hanging. The floor is strewn with sand and discarded cigarettes, wine bottles, coffee cups, and take-out food containers, as if some adult has tried to re-create the memory of a wondrous day at the beach in the midst of this curtained, melancholy room.

Installation view of Manfredi Beninati's "Fruits from an ocean nearby"