Pier Paolo Pancotto, “Manfredi Beninati”, in ARTFORUM vol. 51, May 2013
The summer of 2003 was exceedingly hot in Rome, the air heavy, motionless, as if it were hostage to the sun and its scorching rays. This was a fitting context for the debut of a young artist hailing from the heat of Palermo, in southern Italy: Manfredi Beninati, who had recently moved to the Italian capital. Thinking back to that scalding and indolent summer, one can still easily recall Beninati’s early paintings and their reception: From the start, his work was endowed with a special quality determined by its ability to suspend traditional concepts of time and space. The artist still plays freely with these fundamental dimensions of thought through graphic and chromatic iterations of personal, historical, literary, and cinematographic memories. (Beninati had worked on films by the likes of Giuseppe Tornatore and Damiano Damiani.) Beninati’s modus operandi has remained essentially (…)
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