Riccardo Benvenuti was born in Lucca in 1939. He lives and works in
Lucca, New York and Los Angeles. At a very early age he came to the
attention of the critics, and his work is shown in the most important galleries
and museums in Europe and America.
In occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Giacomo Puccini's death and at
the request of the Puccini Foundation, he prepared a series of exhibitions
dedicated to the Lucchese composer and his heroines at the Lincoln Center
Metropolitan in New York, Chicago and Madrid. In collaboration with Salvador
Dali he designed the 'Medaglie dell'Augurio'? coined by the Gold Market of
Milan.
He has designed posters for the soccer World Cup, the Los Angeles
Olympic Games, the boxing world championships and the Giro d'Italia cycle
race. Under the auspices of the theatrical museum of La Scala, he has
executed an exclusive series of collectors' porcelain entitled "Puccini's
women", produced by the Bradford Exchange, Chicago.
In the field of publisbing be has illustrated books for children, including
"Gnenco il pirata" by Vincenzo Pardini published by Emme Edizioni Finaudi.
Recently Giorgin Mondadori e Associati published a monograph, introduced
by Paolo Levi which covers his entire output.
"There are many possible openings
into the world of Riccardo Benvenuti's
paintings; some of these are more
accessible and slightly obvious,
whereas others, far more interesting,
are less obvious, as if cleverly hidden
by the artist.
It would be easy to fall into the trap
of speaking about his women, with
their tender glances, suggestive or
coy. This approach would be too
obvious because too exterior, or
rather weighed down by that taste for
the merely decorative typical of many
figurative artists.
that is why it is necessary for the
critic to attack the exterior, created by
Benvenuti by means of his colours and
brushstrokes, in order to understand
not so much the motivation behind his
paintings, which would be an
undertaking of a metaphysical nature,
as the strength, the subtle energy,
which animates their gestures and
which turns the superficial image,
however attractive in itself, into a
profound and thoughtful living thing.
In Benvenuti's canvases, the
owerwhelming impression is of this
impulse which comes from the
innermost being and is translated
a painted figure. breaking free of
context and of the iconography which
has been part and parcel of this
painter for several decades.
The girls. the nymphs. the terrifying
Salomes are, seen from this point of
view, almost a pretext. a way of saying
something else, which Benvenuti as a
straightforward Tuscan who dislikes
the sophistry of learned language,
caIls "beauty". It is a kind of beauty
which is basically simple and which he
is at pains not to confuse with the kind
of beauty which aesthetics deals with,
all studied balance and harmonious
proportions. Beauty Benvenuti says,
first of alI a force which moves and
thrills, far removed from the traditional
canon which separates the beautiful
codified in its perfect forms, from the
ugly just as rigidly defined. To be
more precise, this means that only in a
few rare cases, deliberately chosen
from thousands of others, can beauty
be described as harmony between the
soul and the outward appearance, and
it is here and nowhere else that love
can be found.
They could just as well be hills,
landscapes, interiors of imaginary
cathedrals: sometimes Benvenuti has
not been afraid to abandon the human
fogure for the balance of objects whose
light and transparency he conveys.
And neither has he been afraid in
years past, to brave the storms of the
formless and the abstract, achieving
worthy results.
And yet his true territory is
elsewhere, his single protagonist is
woman, set before us in a charming
procession, with a renaissance flavour
conveyed by hints of veils and
drapery, and a parade of glances and
beautiful eyes wide open on the
canvas.
Once more it is love, according to
Benvenuti, that brings them to life,
enriched by intelligence and a strong
dose of eros, the more ancient type
which Plato defined as the principle
end the prime motivation of
knowledge. This explains the slight
sexuality of his girls, who are certainly
beauties, suggestive and full of
promises, and yet capable of
sublimating every earthbound instinct
in the rarified atmosphere of pure
contemplation and thought.
His tecnique provides a further
example, refined and masterful in all
its aspects, a technique which uses
gesture to purify rather than weigh
down and which is translated into a
beautiful and evanescent play of light,
hints of backgrounds and lightning
strokes of primary colours.
The dominant feature in many of his
recent works, however, is the darkness
of the backgrounds, a kind of screen
against which are projected these
ghosts of the beautiful and where the
dreaming or maliciously witch-like
faces of his girls are framed.
Benvenutis' artistry lies in this
knowing pretence of the attainable
quality of the beautiful, but also ih the
exquisite melancholy with which
through a scarcely suppressed smile,
the hint of a gesture or a background
caressed by colour he suggests the
impossibility of achieving true love.
It takes a good deal of skin to
achieve such balance in composition
and design, but most of all soul and a
of the world, man and
things."
