Giulio Bensasson
Curated by spazioSERRA
Critical text by Saverio Verini
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On display from 28/10/2021 to 25/11/2021
Opening Thursday 28/10/2021 at 19:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan
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Giulio Bensasson (Rome, Italy, 1990) lives and works in Rome.
His artistic practice develops mainly through sculptural language and installation. Among the subjects at the center of the work, time is the primary element present in many of his works. He holds a diploma in Painting and a specialist diploma in Sculpture and New Technologies Applied to Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Between 2012 and 2015 he worked as an assistant at the Roman studio of Baldo Diodato and collaborated with the Bolognese collective Apparati Effimeri (2013). He currently works as an assistant for the artist Alfredo Pirri.
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Saverio Verini (Citta di Castello, Italy, 1985) is a curator of exhibition projects, festivals, cycles of meetings related to contemporary art and culture. He has collaborated with institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, MACRO, the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, American Academy in Rome, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the ArtVerona fair. He is currently in charge of coordinating the exhibitions of the Memmo Foundation in Rome. He collaborates with the magazine Artribune, for which he curates the Studio Visit column, dedicated to emerging artists.
Unique
Unique is the site-specific exhibition of the artist Giulio Bensasson within venerazioneMUTANTE, the exhibition season of spazioSERRA dedicated to the transformation of site-specific works during their permanence. The exhibition is visible from Thursday 28 October to Thursday 25 November in the Lancetti railway station, Milan.
One of the central elements of Bensasson's research is time, understood as the culminating moment of an act or as a slow and inexorable process. Time is an expressive material to work with and compromise with, letting the randomness of its effects be an integral part of the technique. To this is added and inevitably linked to another topic, that of still life, and in particular the memento mori: a genre that has always represented art's attention to the real, the banal and the everyday. Objects, memory, time and its effects on matter are at the heart of Unique site-specific work.
In Unique several hundreds of pink flowers welcome the phrase “YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE”, destined to disappear with the decay of the material that composes it. The phrase appears as a cheesy declaration of love or as an advertising slogan. Saverio Verini writes in the critical text accompanying the exhibition: “A lie, however, has no legs. The flowers that form the sentence are destined to wither within a few days, as if the work had an expiration date capable of contradicting the promise of happiness it exhibits. The low-cost romanticism of the writing turns into its opposite; sloganistic pandering leaves room for reflection on the passage of time, on the end of things".
spazioSERRA is located in a station, a romantic space par excellence, a place for greetings, farewells, declarations of love. "YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE" is however a consumerist declaration, a vain praise to the individual who does not carry with it a real value, it is false, as it is addressed to an indistinct mass of commuters, such as advertising and commercial attitudes that tend to make us believe we are unique and special. The pink color of the flowers contributes to the feeling of vainglory that the work wants to communicate: often used in contexts of struggle, of reappropriation, today it is widely used in advertising. Capitalism appropriates elements of struggle by exploiting them and Bensasson, with an ironic and sardonic attitude, accuses and derides the system, overturning the meaning of its messages. Verini writes again: "To whom is Bensasson's work addressed? Probably to no one, however, giving the illusion of pointing out all the passers-by who will cross it with their eyes. It is here that the artist's intervention reveals its cynical irony, its being the ideal background for failed selfies".