ERMENEGILDO FRIONI
FriArte Roma
Giovanna Benzi, through the shapes of the wind, weaves aerial landscapes of admirable beauty, inviting us to look up to return to our childhood. With virtuosity of sign and color, she creates artworks in which sky and clouds become the protagonists of celestial landscapes where the silence of metaphysical memory creates an imaginary ideal of stillness. The artist observes with curiosity and interest the work of the great artists of the past and of the modern, to communicate in her own language the oasis of beauty which is, fundamentally, a journey of an inner search, a glimmer of salvation sought beyond the contingency of everyday life. It is always difficult to write something new for an artist, especially when the critics who have dealt with her have been able to grasp the deepest meaning of her work with extreme finesse. But it is easy for me to perceive how Giovanna Benzi’s work lives on metaphors, hiding from the distracted observer, behind a cloud, an entire inner world where feelings are shaken, where joy and fear have an uncertain border. Painting as a metaphor of life, therefore, of the will to go beyond, from the finite to the infinite, from the relationship with the world to the solitude. Loneliness understood as an expression of freedom, a toll to be paid to obtain the access, although a short one, to a dimension that is different from the ordinary nature of everyday life. This is how these works of extraordinary beauty are generated, in which the repetition of the subject is an exercise in style, a poetic study on the same theme that presents itself in a different way, thanks to the pictorial ability of Giovanna Benzi. After all, the clouds, aren’t they the “place” where all the forms of the world are deposited?
