Anamorfica

In Anamorfica, Gianna Bentivenga continues her dialogue with the idea around which she builds her work: the gradual leading of forms—or rather, Form—to dissolution. An undoing that starts the endless journey of something else which is born or persists despite all things, almost as if claiming the right to be in turn dissolved. In other words, the making visible of a process that is a sort of endless end, paradoxically abiding on this side of total annihilation.

Considering Bentivenga’s work, one is reminded of Galileo‘s definition of the phenomenon of rarefaction: Continual rarefaction of said substances, which by dilating and therefore seeking increasingly wide spaces, exert force against their container. 

Now the artist, in the series she names after this physical phenomenon, gradually makes light silent, allowing darkness to dilate, to push for space, the plate appearing to be silent, showing a near-total blackness with some scant shivers of light, a luminous wake of its destruction, its being rendered unusable. 

Such destruction invites two observations. Firstly, whilst technically it is true that the plate will be destroyed, that the gestures in the printing process are unrepeatable, that the decision made by that hand will be unstoppable and inexorable, concentrating on the last page of Rarefazione will clearly show the darkness yielding the first form of the series. A sort of unsilenced phantom embodying the etymological valency: something that re-appears, that is made visible not as a simulacrum or hollowed imago, but as something absolutely vital; not only the negative of a time when the matter of light was present, but rather a negation of nothingness, albeit in the awareness of an end. In other words, a darkness that is not tenebrous but points to a caesura, an end that might certainly be dramatic but that still grants the form that has just slowly released it a chance for  metamorphosis. Secondly, that nearly dark sheet appears as the coda to certain Beethoven sonatas. In music, a coda brings an episode to a close: in those sonatas, it in fact seems to unfold from the beginning along a retrospective line, at first meditating on the secondary theme, then moving on to the main one and to the transition to the second theme, increasing as it leads us to the finale into a highly dramatic tension that nonetheless never drowns its starting point. This is it: the Rarefazione series moves along these lines.

It is thus a series finding its perfect collocation within the context of the exhibition, within an anamorphosis. For here too we note a visible, vortex-like change of state and sense. Yet even this sudden change retains a permanence. The engraved sign builds both the anamorphosis and the miorror through which it can be read, that apparently one-sided point of view that will allow an apprehension of its sense. Bentivenga thus builds a double artifice that has us face yet another form of dissolution: namely, the falling away of a univocal sense. The varying depths built by the signs and the sliding of one depth over the other generate forms much more complex than might be apparent at first glance—and here the artist leads us closer to the biological side of anamorphosis than the level of visual rhetoric. This points not so much to the unrecognizability of the sign as to the idea that the true meaning of anamorphosis entirely rests on distortion: not in its releasing, since it is not true distortion but another construction, a space accessible in an other manner. Bentivenga thus places us on the slanted plane from which we might be able to decipher the hidden meaning, inviting us to appraise its instability—or further still, the futility of searching for a single meaning which would in the end also be ephemeral. It is not by chance that the itinerary of the exhibition includes works titled Equilibri Multipli, their powerful upfront impact challenging the viewer to find an angle by which to read and decode a mass with several equilibria, each poised in a precarious balance. The impossibility of thinking of the form of a work of art, or in fact of a discourse, as immutable in time and not apt to be resemanticized is also shown in a lithograph that the author has chosen to print on grey paper, creating a most delicate relationship between support and sign, where the latter voluntarily acquiesces in becoming cloud, forgoing the clear-cut strength we are accustomed to seeing in Bentivenga’s work. The choice to move towards a sort of  indistinctness that never falls into confusion, forgetfulness or smudging, but rather is a chromatic scale of many possible meanings within one of the floating forms of an action that time is already changing into the space of the paper. 

In his novel Ornamental, Juan Cárdenas writes: “Works of art are not finished but accomplished like prophecies, they do not precede facts, they are pure actions, they have no other purpose than action itself, and once the work is accomplished, once the action is accomplished, the time of the thing begins. The thing is what will die, what will be consumed, what will fall apart.”

The many meanings enclosed in the “thing” remain entrusted to the viewer’s gaze.

Michela Becchis