Jacopo Benassi: MATRICE

Fondazione Carispezia presents Jacopo Benassi’s MATRICE exhibition, inaugurated at the dedicated area located in La Spezia, on Saturday, April 9. The exhibition is being curated by Antonio Grulli and will remain open until Sunday July 31. After years of recognition both in Italy and abroad, Jacopo Benassi comes back to his hometown with an exhibition that is probably his most ambitious and intimate project.

The exhibition MATRICE focuses on the artist’s past and his relationship with the city of La Spezia, a place of growth and life, and how it influenced his artistic journey. The title itself was designed to encompass all this: the city is a sort of “mother figure” from which Jacopo’s life and journey began, and at the same time an essential hub of creativity, a big metaphorical studio from which he can draw ideas, images, and visions. Therefore, the works on display concentrate on this relationship with a city that goes from being a geographical and meeting place to an intimate one, intertwined with the most personal aspects of the artist’s life.

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, a plasterboard structure with a particular triangular “uterine” shape was built in the main hall of the exhibition area of Fondazione Carispezia; it became the artist’s room of creativity and work, and the focal point, the MATRICE, of the exhibition. The works brought to life in this area offer an insight into the artist’s evolving journey with photography: indeed the photographs are exhibited alongside paintings and sculptures made by Benassi himself and inspired by the important painter from La Spezia Agostino Fossati, whom the artist loved and saw as an inspiration from which to start to understand himself, his professional career, and his own relationship with the city.

Once the works were completed, actual portions of the plasterboard walls of the work space, of the MATRICE, were cut out and removed. These “slices” are now exhibited in the rooms of Fondazione Carispezia and are a fundamental part of the display on which the exhibited works are set up: a sort of large-scale installation art that moves across the whole exhibition area.

Therefore, MATRICE is an exhibition in which painting, photography and sculpture bring about some original strange hybrids, some hangings that are presented simply suspended from fixtures of the MATRICE, or placed on tailor-made wobbly tables, as if they had been saved from destruction. Painting makes an entry among Benassi’s art languages: he uses his paintings as a visual and spiritual background of close-up and nocturnal pictures of La Spezia, its sea and its coast.

During the months the exhibition will be open, a series of public meetings will also be held with personalities who played an important role in the artist’s growth and will further enlighten us while offering a partial reconstruction of his human and professional path. Jacopo Benassi is a self-taught artist who has crossed paths with people (musicians, fellow artists, gallery owners, writers, critics…) over the years who have left an essential mark on his soul: they became his school and his teachers.

Programs
Location: Mediateca Regionale Ligure “Sergio Fregoso” via Firenze, 37. 19122 La Spezia, SP
CORTILE #1: May 10, 9:30–11pm, conversation with Mariuccia Casadio and Jacopo Benassi.
CORTILE #2: June 11, 9:30–11pm, conversation with Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Jacopo Benassi.
CORTILE #3: July 15, 9:30–11pm, conversation with Valerio Magrelli and Jacopo Benassi.
CORTILE #4: July 23, 9:30–11pm, concert with Lori Goldston, Larsen and Jacopo Benassi.

Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, April–May 4–9pm / June–July 6–10pm / Monday, April 25 open / April 22–24, 11am–9pm