Carlo Benvenuto (Stresa, 1966) presents a large exhibition at the Mart, designed for the spaces of the museum and assigning a cameo role to its Collections. The exhibition features a selection of sixty works of art from the 1990s to today. Photographs, sculptures and paintings come together to form a large metaphysical composition.
During his 20+-year career, the photography medium has privileged Benvenuto's ability to examine the world closely, and phenomenologically, elevating his vision to a perceptive and sentimental verification of life. He does so by contemplating what appears familiar, domestic and intimate, exploring the mute insistence of the objects he portrays and bringing the long preparatory phases of his work to conclusion in the immediacy of the camera shot. In this universe of objects, furniture and mirrors, the narrator, and the private mythology, are silent: the works are untitled, their function is not to describe.
The exhibition – states the artist - "is in an ideal orbit around a centre containing four types of self-portrait".
In the various aspects that characterise the exhibition layout, the theme of duality is constantly instated, through reflections, pairings, dialogues with the paintings of the museum collection, repetitions and variants, until it meets a pictorial self-portrait that Benvenuto has conceived as "solitary", unique in scanning the emptiness, an apparently unrelated enigma, but a decisive clue for considering all the artist's work as an essential self-reflection.
Chosen from the Mart's Collections by the artist himself, the exhibition features self-portraits by three great early twentieth-century artists: Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi and Renato Guttuso.