Enrico Benetta, Aqua Virgo

curated by Gabriele Simongini

The regenerative power of water, letters as a recurring visual texture, suggestive tears in glass containing a mirroring liquid.
There is all the dense and prolific artistic and expressive universe of Enrico Benetta in Aqua Virgo, the exhibition curated by critic Gabriele Simongini that is first and foremost a tribute to water and its multiple meanings. On display for the first time is The beginning of time, a site-specific installation specific installation consisting of a series of terracotta amphorae containing blown Murano glass inside Murano glass in which Bodoni letters have been fused, the printing typeface par excellence, a stylistic hallmark of Benetta, the basis for the creation of an original and random visual texture. The artist – observes Simongini – sees letters “as things and forms, as facts, as concrete signs in the space and time of acting and creating” so as to “concretise in the language absolutely autonomous and specific language of the visual arts (between painting, sculpture and installation, with a very well-calibrated hybridisation) a poetic metamorphosis of words and letters into forms
colours, plastic structures that intertwine, connect, lose themselves and search for meaning at the same time […]”. at the same time […]’. Also on show are a series of canvases representing sky, air and earth, made with the usual mixed technique on canvas and the insertion of letters in cor-tèn steel and the imposing white hourglass in cor-tèn steel from the Macro’s exhibition From Today to Tomorrow.