For the exhibition The Words of Time, curated by Lorenzo Canova and with a catalogue text by Miriam Castelnuovo, Enrico Benetta presents about thirty site-specific works: canvases, sculptures and installations that fully delineate the fundamental traits of his artistic research, marked by the great passion for writing and in particular his choice of the Bodoni: “My poetics took shape
immediately in a precise direction: falling in love with typeface […] I had the
thunderbolt for the Bodoni typeface. I merged writing and painting because for me they are one and the same thing, the tangible sign of a total experience’ (E. Benetta from an interview in ‘ArteIn’).
The Bodoni typeface, which has become the artist’s distinctive stylistic signature, is bent in these works to painting, cor-tèn steel and mirror steel, giving rise to a contemporary and unprecedented, that without oxymora and contradictions, finds in the typical harmony of the classical past, its its own roots and raison d’être.
“Benetta therefore works on the history of writing in relation to the arts, on the shared language between word and image, confronting for example the clarity of classical epigraphs, through a Bodonian character of lapidary solemnity unravelled and recomposed in the rigorous structure of plates minimalist cor-tèn steel plates.”
