Benini : A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose

by Sam Francis

Evening Herald , Sanford, FL.
Sunday August 1981

When Benini first painted a lake in the background of his paintings in December, 1979, he was living in a century old, wooden house in Evinston, Florida.

He had no plans to move.

But soon after, he was approached by a professor and his wife who wanted to buy the historic home. About the same time, his urge to live near the water surfaced again. The paintings with lakes in the background now seem highly prophetic. Within three months of the time he painted them, Benini bought a cottage on the shores of Lake Harney in Seminole County and built a studio there with 18 windows overlooking the water.

 He lives there now, after a long journey that brought him from his homeland Italy via Grand Bahama, where he lived on a houseboat topped with a pyramid, then to Evinston -now Geneva. I caught up with the artist several days after the grand opening of Halseys in Winter Park which featured Benini’s paintings in the premiere exhibition of its Fine Arts program. My curiosity was aroused after witnessing the mob scene at Halseys, when more than 1000 well-wishers showed up for the unveiling of Benini’s latest works.

 After a brief introduction to some of his newest paintings, we discussed art and life, as the waves of Lake Harney gently lapped the beach before us.

 “Ignorance is the one quality everyone is born with, “Benini said. “Through passages called environment and experiences  (life ) , this ignorance gets whittled away, constantly changing the essence of man.

 “One of the measuring tools of this eliminating of ignorance is art and blessed are the communities that have achieved an appreciation for the arts. A high degree of harmony and a higher respect of man's achievements usually pervade these communities. As life progressively evolves from a survival level to a level of sophistication, it marks the growth of a civilization.”

He seemed at ease, accustomed to questioning about his art, yet reticent to spell out detailed explanations of his work. “The work speaks for itself, “ is the way he put it, but he encouraged -in fact, he seemed to enjoy my own efforts to verbalize what I saw and felt in his paintings. Benini's views on art in Florida reflect his presence here. “At the onset of the 80s, Florida seems to be the open frontier land for art. Private enterprise is booming and an ever-growing sophisticated national and international audience is beginning to support the arts in their various formats.

 A number of recognized artists have chosen Florida as their living place, particularly in fields like painting and sculpture, that do not require an immediate audience.” I proceed to look for answers in his work, hoping to glean more information about the creator in the process. I knew bare facts - master of mystical roses and the superconscious, veteran of more than 55 one man shows in museums, galleries, and universities throughout the western world , internationally known for his huge Superroses, monochromatic canvases up to 8 feet wide. I also knew he abandoned a highly successful career as a business entrepreneur to pursue his art fulltime.

 In his manner of living, he seems to seek no greater pleasure than to excel in his profession, devoting himself mainly to study and painting.  The walls of his home are lined with books.  What is this man seeking? And how does he set out to find the answers to questions that haunt him? Speaking in his customary plurality, he explained, “We set out to a life of creativity with the same spirit as a pilgrim. We have lightened our emotional and physical baggage to a minimum, in order to be able to wander through the paths of the mind in our quest for the self.  

“We have journeyed through the past, uncovering tracks previously known to us and yet buried in the sands of memory and we are constantly taking these steps onto new paths.

 “There are no limits to all that needs to be known and to our capacity in due time to do so. Our respect for the passages of life has increased with the unfolding of our understanding, and each bit of light has dispersed the fear of darkness and brought the elements of faith into our life, a faith free to grow, unbound by dogmas. As a forever evolving element, art needs total freedom. “

His approach to life overlaps his approach to art. With this in mind, the paintings reveal certain clues we might not otherwise find. For example, we see evidence of his intense contact and research with nature. The unfolding pageantry of an endless succession of roses and the exploration of design, color fields and interplay of light and shadow within them , the human figure, snakes, eggs, birds,  mountains. Through the ripple of a muscle, to the minute detail of an eye, to the tension of a poised snake, we detect an extensive study of nature and her movements.

 What we can't see is the radical act of simplification -the focusing, the discarding of countless choices and ideas to come up with the final selection of one  particular style, one finished product. We are also aware of the corresponding exploration of ideas and questions voiced in the paintings. These are suggestive works. Each painting goes beyond the sum of its elements. In the depths of the unconscious, Benini's paintings evoke the atmosphere of a lost paradise or a promised land yet to come, where man at peace can contemplate his existence before the eternal beauties of nature.

 
“Pleiades” a four feet by 5 feet canvas, suggests both presence and absence, a horizon that splices both dream and reality. At the far edge of the tangible and the imaginary, it invites us into the domain of pure contemplation. Benini has a true passion to pursue the unknown, to jump right into the midst of mystery, hammer away at fantasies and facts alike, creating a rush of creative violence that eventually erupts into a surprisingly composed and tranquil painting.

 To grasp Benini's art, we must approach it with a mind open to travel into the realms he opens up for us and even beyond. It is art that allows us to transcend our time and what we usually see around us . He gives us a dialogue to the distant, and put the mystery back into our lives. In “Paris’s Dilemma,“ Benini fuses form and void comment linking foreground and background so they evoke an unprecedented feeling of transience. Curves are diaphanous and lose themselves, pedals waver and disappear, and what seems precise disappears into a prophetic abyss -organic matter in perpetual motion. Such paintings crossover the bridge between the actuality of life and the ambiguities of life.

Benini works with acrylics on canvas. The extent of his dexterity with the brush is evidenced when viewers mistake his works for airbrush , a technique he never uses. He is capable of orchestrating any mood, color or emotion with the handheld brush. He is also master of suggesting with full power of the palette through the use of one predominant color. Blue, now supplemented by whiteness, accented by isolated spots of vivid color, reveals the intensity of vision in a world of futuristic mythologies.

No artist in the world has made more extensive or symbolic expressions of the Rose. Although Benini has concentrated on the design and structure of the Rose, he constantly pursued more than that. He painted not roses, but the Rose, as the conveyor of many great themes, visual analogies of life's questions. He explored its universal symbology, he entered it as one enters a cave, he circumvented it, painted it as the human body the sky , earth, inside the philosophical egg and deep within the cavern of the psyche.

In Benini’s 1981 paintings, a different mood transpired -a pictorial and spiritual metamorphosis that goes beyond our sense of everyday reality. The real value of the work, as I see it, is the way it offers valid and universal truths in a dazzling new form, born out of the open skies of Florida, seen through the eyes of a Mind Pilgrim.