Set up in the Milan branch of Galleria Russo, the exhibition Verba manent scripta volant, curated by Matteo Tosi proposes the works of Enrico Benetta, whose work is marked by a language that moves moves on different stylistic registers in which distant cultural sources merge together, an indication of a strong personality, characterized by an intense desire to communicate.
A distinctive feature of his works, whether they are canvases or installations, is the printing typeface par excellence, the Bodoni, which has become the artist’s stylistic signature, the basis for the creation of an original and casual visual “plot.” “…the almost unconscious choice of the “bodoni” as the primal sign of all his art, this instinctive and inescapable fascination with that harmonious alternation of
voids and solids, weight and lightness, thin lines and marked fields, evokes surprisingly well the irrepressible freedom of his view of the world and his kaleidoscopic approach to art and life, disenchanted but never disillusioned, unconditionally translated into eclectic compositions that all do, however, except renounce their formal order and elegance” (M. Tosi).
It is as if the “letter” for Benetta, was not the primary element of the word, but an “quid essential” to be contemplated in itself, as a constituent thought of the work itself. The letters in fact fall from the pages creating new adventures that the viewer’s imagination absorbs and reworks, attributing to them a different meaning each time. Corten steel, a natural material used for the sculptures, transmits to the works that patina of the past that fully evokes the charm of the large volumes of stories.
