TEMA CELESTE (2005)
INTERVIEW WITH MANFREDI BENINATI
by Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Cullinan: I’ve read that one influence on your work is Italo Calvino’s ‘Le città invisibili’, in which Marco Polo describes to Kublai Kahn all the cities he has visited, but whose memories are actually based on just one – Venice. Do your paintings recall real or imaginary places?
Manfredi Beninati: Calvino is just a great writer so he has certainly somehow influenced me as a person (therefore all that comes from me), though I wouldn’t say he was a major source of learning and understanding. As a matter of fact, I don’t see in my imagery any elements that can be traced back to his work. I just enjoy reading his books. As regards that particular novel (Le città invisibili), I have to say that’s not even one of my favourite Calvinos. It just happened that while I was reading it, I was making a series of maps of the world and used the names of his cities instead of real ones. Then I started using some of those names on my other drawings and paintings. With regard to this I want to specify that the caption in my pictures isn’t meant to be a title but rather an annotation of the place where “I witnessed” the action portrayed “by heart” (it is all made up, of course!). Nowadays I either make up names of places myself or use the ones from my childhood memories.
NC: Where do you draw your imagery from?
MB: I once made up this story that I (as a kid) used to spend most of my days in the woods playing with a bunch of weird people, one of whom was this naïf painter called Antonio Ligabue (who actually existed, he only died in the sixties). So, according to this story I’ve then inherited Ligabue’s imagery. The thing that fascinated me the most about this guy was the fact (which I first noticed when I was very young) that many of his paintings are infested with flies and other insects (but mostly flies). Mainly his self-portraits… he always has one or two flies on his nose or his chin or forehead. He was also obsessed with wildlife, especially tigers, rattlesnakes and poisonous spiders that he would make stories about, of which he would be the protagonist. He also loved riding motorbikes (his greatest passion, actually), so all these are the elements of my inherited imagery. My other fantasy world consists in inducted memories from my childhood. Some of them are real, some other were real and have been adjusted to my convenience (made more or less rich), some others are completely fictitious. Places where I have been, people that I have seen…I like lying a lot.
NC: There is also a very cinematic aspect to your paintings, and I understand that you worked as an assistant director to Tornatore and Damiani. How did this training inform your aesthetic, and do you think of cinematography and painting as complementary or contradictory?
MB: I lead a cinematographic life. I like to think that life is a film whose plot I can change at any point of it. That helps me to take things more carelessly and to be more adventurous. I also never believe people’s stories, or at least I don’t pay too much attention to them, as I know it’s all relative. The images that I portray in my mind are always treated as “life-stills” rather than film-stills. That means I imagine I have really been there and that’s a snapshot taken through my eyes and impressed in my brain. So, yes in that sense my pictures are cinematic. Painting isn’t complementary or contrary to cinema, it is just a medium with its own life and, maybe a bit to “intrusive”. It is certainly very demanding. Demanding because sometimes it asks you for more attention and seduces you. And that’s very time-consuming and distracting, because it forces you into its materiality and you forget why you were making that picture.
NC: A lot of your works seem to be based on the tension and ambiguity between binary opposites. For example, the light in your paintings appears to be that of dusk – the transition between day and night. Equally, the subject of childhood prevalent in many of them suggests the passage from innocence to experience, and the motif of modes of transports such as bicycles speaks of being in transit from one point to another. I suppose the word that links all of these is ‘transience’. Would you agree with this?
MB: I proceed in my work like circus-people walk on a tightrope. Constantly leaning left and right, back and forth to try and keep the balance which I identify with my truth. I like the moving back and forth more than the moment of balance though. That’s probably why my pictures are so confusingly full of things scattered all over the surface, therefore elusive and difficult to focus. So, yes, I think I agree with you.
NC: A big theme for you seems to be a certain nostalgia, which in itself implies a kind of mourning and melancholy. Are memories comforting or disquieting for you?
MB: Transience is the key to this question too. I’m not really nostalgic and I am not mourning either. I am actually very content. I’m glad I had the childhood I had and am very satisfied with everything and with the person I am today. I know I’m nothing special and I’m glad I’m not as I prefer standing aside and observing things. It’s all such a joke that I can’t stop laughing. There are lots of things that I want to do in life though and I’m working towards them. This moment of my life and what I’m doing now is just a phase like all the others. Memories are comforting because they remind you have roots. They can also be discomforting for the same reason. I like the idea of tomorrow better though and the sensations of today even more.
NC: Your Sicilian background interests me, maybe a little touristically. For example, your recent wax sculptures remind me of brightly coloured, sickly-sweet Sicilian cakes. At the same time, the air of decay that pervades these works recalled to me the corpses in the catacombs of Palermo. Your works provoked a simultaneous attraction and repulsion in me that reminded me of seeing these things in Palermo, one that seemed particularly Sicilian. Is this a valid interpretation of your work, or a foreigner’s cliché?
MB: Yes, you are probably right… I’ve never though this before, but it’s very likely that this is right. Although I left Sicily quite young (18-19) that’s were most of my real imagery was formed. I don’t think your interpretation is just a cliché. Sicily is an extremely complex place… it isn’t just a place in fact, it is the conceptualization and materialization of “contradiction-in-terms”. That means it is everything and its opposite at once, that translates into: (everything + nothing = everything) / (everything x nothing = nothing) = Sicilian culture. Everything makes sense just as well as nothing does… unexplainable!… beautiful!
Manfredi Beninati was born in 1970 in Palermo. He lives and works in Campagnano Romano. Nicholas Cullinan is an art historian and critic. He lives and works in Rome.
Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Cullinan, Manfredi Beninati, Tema Celeste, November 2005
Copyright © 2005 Tema Celeste