Benini was born in 1941 in Imola, in the Emilia Romagna region. Paintings and watercolors from the 1950’s illustrate landscapes and still lifes in a traditional style. After leaving his parents' home in his teens, he survived primarily as an itinerant painter, painting small watercolors and oils using his bicycle as an easel…

In the winter of 1957, he was hired by an Italian company operating transatlantic and Caribbean cruise ships and went to sea.

During two years of these voyages, he became acquainted with the art scene in  New York and schools of painting through the different Caribbean islands. In New York he discovered acrylics which were unknown at that time in Europe. Since then, he has used this medium exclusively for his paintings. 

In 1959, Benini returned to Italy to fulfill his military obligation. In winters, he was assigned to the Ski patrol in Valtellina. Upon his discharge he resumed travels and painting in seven European countries. His exhibition career started with a one-man show at the Conte Biancamano Club in Milano in 1962. By 1965, his painting evolved into largescale monochromatic renderings of the single figure which, during his first show in New York, was labeled by critics as “Monorealism.” 

In 1965, he returned to the sea and by the end of the year, he disembarked in Freeport, Grand Bahama where he settled for 13 years.  While living on the island and exhibiting in Europe and the Americas, he alternated large scale representations of the rose and dream-like paintings with symbolist content.

In 1978, Benini charted a DC-9, flew to Palm Beach with all his possessions and bought a home in Evinston, Florida to have access to the library of the University of Florida. That winter, he met his future wife, Lorraine, a graduate student at the university, when she interviewed him for an exhibition there. He lived in this village until 1980, and together they moved to the shore of Lake Harney, of the north-flowing St. Johns river northeast of Orlando. During a journey west for an exhibition at the University of Nevada, he met author Robert Monroe of Journeys Out of the Body fame.

Upon his return to the studio, he suddenly changed the subject of his work, leaving the symbol of the rose after 20 years and turned to geometry,  starting first with simple cubes, spheres and triangles.

In this work, Benini created paintings with a highly disciplined technique, applying acrylics by brush, transforming familiar geometric and organic shapes into lyrical canvases that, stretched over flat aluminum, hang inches from the wall, enhancing the illusion of dimension.

This work continued until they moved to Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas in 1988, and purchased a 10,000 sq.ft.  historic building on the famous Bathhouse Row and renovated it according to National Historic Guidelines. This resort city,  known for its hot mineral waters,  had been healing grounds for all the Indian tribes of the Midwest and South. In the 1920’s, known as “Bubbles”,  it became a gathering retreat of choice for the Chicago and New York mobsters (Al Capone,  Lucky Luciano, etc.). After the gangster era, Hot Springs became a destination of choice for tourists seeking gambling and the beauties of nature.

Benini and Lorraine found themselves in the center of the arts activities in this town that become one of the hot spots for cultural happenings in the 90’s. With friends, they started numerous cultural organizations and events, including the Hot Springs Gallery Walk, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (Lorraine was a founding board member and president for 12 years), and the Hot Springs Poetry Reading, all continuing three decades later.

After buying a 143-acre ranch previously owned by President Lyndon Johnson in the heart of the Texas Hill Country in 1999, a new energy entered Benini’s work. In 2003, he began the Courting Kaos series with a new application process that combined his hand blended backgrounds and selectively dropped acrylics in controlled patterns evolving into paintings that often related to Italian Baroque as well as the simple elegance of Islamic pattern art.

A series of 17 “Face of God” paintings were among the last paintings created in his Johnson City studio.

Through the years, Benini has also produced assemblages he calls divertimenti. Varying in size from a few inches to 15 feet, these three dimensional works are built with different materials: aluminum, wood, steel, stone and granite.

In 2014, they bought a 35 acre property near Marble Falls, and created MUSEOBENINI, a compound that includes his studios, a library primarily related to the arts, and 6500 sq. ft. galleries to showcase the evolution of his paintings through a career spanning 60+ years..  Now open on Saturdays 10 -6, and other days by appointment , visitors are welcome and art tours can be scheduled for groups and students.

To date, Benini has had 163 (mostly solo) exhibitions, and he continues to exhibit primarily in museums, universities and public institutions.