Davide Benati. L'inafferrabile consistenza delle cose

A selection of large paintings watercolours on Tibetan paper pasted onto canvass created by Davide Benati over the last six months, where the artist has revisited some of the cycles he had worked on during the eighties and nineties, but with surprising innovations in image construction and colours that highlight the expressive force and visual impact of his work even more than before.
As Sandro Parmiggiani explains in his essay these new paintings are a confirmation of some of the characteristics of Benati's painting. His use of watercolour dismantles any certainty and reliability regarding contours and the consistency of things: forms and colours show themselves to be structurally' liable, frayed, fluctuating, for ever under attack from air and light, even though, basically, the most fragile things are what appear to be the strongest. Light which radiates from colours, the cradle of luminosity that is inherent in them, has not vanished, but its extension suffers from the darkened shades and seems to take on a less familiar, less recognisable countenance, as though it were about to fall into shadow, to give in to the siege of obscurity.
Davide Benati (born in Reggio Emilia, 1949) held his first exhibition in the Milanese gallery Il Giorno in 1972, and has since exhibited successfully with solo and collective exhibitions in private and public galleries both in Italy and abroad. The most important of these have been two appearances at the Venice Biennial (1982, in the Aperto section and 1990 with a space devoted to him) and his solo exhibitions in Modena (Galleria Civica, 1989) and in Reggio Emilia (Civici Musei, 1992).