Manfredi Beninati

Born in Palermo in 1970. Lives in Palermo and Los Angeles

After dropping out of both law and film school and collaborating with well-known Italian directors, Manfredi Beninati began working as an artist, devoting himself to drawing. He spent some time in Spain and England and, in 2002, when came back to Italy, he began to make sculptures and figurative paintings that drew directly on real or (often) imaginary childhood memories. Beninati's paintings and drawings often seem to lack subject and order: through the use of stratification, he seeks a non-hierarchical balance in which all the objects are portrayed on the same plane. Be it a household interior or an imaginary landscape, every sort of setting has the same value and becomes a chance to seek new order. Thanks to his fluid brushstrokes, the artist plays with color gradations and glazes to recreate a rarefied, and sometimes unreal, atmosphere, describing figures that seem to slowly emerge from an often dreamlike, imaginary background. Beninati's pictorial production is intrinsically bound to installations that appear to be deserted sets, spaces that are often inaccessible and that the viewer can only observe through cracks or darkened glass (Venice Biennale 2005, XV Quadriennale of Rome 2008), soliciting a sort of voyeurism which violates the private sphere and the indefiniteness of memory.