Carlo Benvenuto

A C-print photograph in Carlo Benvenuto’s latest exhibition (all works untitled, 2013) depicts a table covered by a white tablecloth. In the middle, a silver fruit dish filled with pears, an apple, and a banana seems to hover above the rest of the scene’s relative flatness. To create this effect, Benvenuto first took a picture of the fruit and then took another exposure of the table. Before printing these images, he superimposed them on the same negative, achieving an optical halo around the fruit bowl reminiscent of a collage. The objects, resulting image, and even Benvenuto’s process seem metaphysical: Rather than just responding to the parameters of material construction, in this exhibition the artist challenges the basic limits of visual comprehension and how often they can spill over in the particularities of recollection.

Usually, Benvenuto portrays his subjects in settings illuminated solely by natural light. But for a few works in this exhibition, he also employed a red filter; the same table with the tablecloth and fruit changes into another image entirely, a still life inundated with vibrant crimson. Because of the similar tonalities between white and silver, the fruit is disengaged from the setting, now visually floating above the picture plane instead of on the table set in reality. In a triptych with backgrounds of floral drapery, he achieves the opposite effect. He places a teacup, an egg on a platter, and a metal chalice all under the same red ambiance, camouflaging and embedding the objects into the patterned background. The same chalice is also photographed alone, upright and overturned, in another work. The entire show refers to the artist’s childhood home in the town of Stresa, Italy, which overlooks picturesque Lake Maggiore. In ways similar to how memory can present twists on factual narrative, Benvenuto’s pictures seem to alter the domestic realities of his youth.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.