Catalog of the exhibition Enrico Benetta. Letters, Alphabets, Graphics, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Isabella de Stefano. The exhibition marks the beginning of the collaboration, as part of a new synergy between public and private, between the Angelica Library and Galleria Russo.
For this solo show in Rome, Enrico Benetta offers more than 20 works that fully delineate the salient features of his artistic research, marked by his great passion for writing: “My poetics was immediately concretized in a precise direction: falling in love with the character typeface […] I had the thunderbolt for the Bodoni typeface. I fused writing and painting because for me they are one, the tangible sign of a total experience ” (E. Benetta from interview on “Artein”).
The Bodoni is the primary and substantial matrix of Enrico Benetta’s works, the stylistic cipher of his entire his production: “The perfect letters of the Bodonian “graziato” stand out and find form in the air, and then find echoing memory and mirror in the canvas that supports and develops them in the void.” (B. Buscaroli).
His creations dialogue with space and the viewer by telling stories that, drawing on the arist’s personal imagination, evoke the places of memory and tradition of Italian art history: plexiglass caskets enclose cor-ten steel letters that emerge from the canvas to form three-dimensional works, a sculptural painting that invites you to take
part in the installation, seamlessly, through a language that is both individual and
at the same time universal: “I want to deprive typefaces of their intrinsic meaning so that everyone can attribute the meaning they prefer, and this must take place in silence, in recollection, far from the din that made the words explode” (E. Benetta from interview on “Artein”)
