La Spezia, Jacopo Benassi's homecoming with Matrix exhibition

From April 10 to July 31, 2022, the Fondazione Carispezia headquarters in La Spezia will host the exhibition Matrice, a solo show by Jacopo Benassi (La Spezia, 1970). For the La Spezia artist, this is a return home after years of recognition in Italy and abroad. The exhibition, curated by Antonio Grulli, revolves around the Ligurian photographer’s past and his relationship with the city of La Spezia, as a place of formation and life that has been able to influence much of his artistic path. The title itself, Matrix, intends to encapsulate all this: the city is in fact “the great mother” from which Jacopo Benassi’s life and path began and at the same time it is a fundamental place of creation in the present, a great expanded studio from which to draw ideas, images, visions. The works on display revolve precisely around this relationship with a city that, from a geographical and collective place, becomes an intimate space and is intertwined with the most personal aspects of the artist’s life.

In the exhibition spaces of the Foundation, a plasterboard structure with a peculiar triangular shape has been built, a place of creation and work, the “Matrix” of the exhibition, within which the artist is creating the works that will constitute the exhibition proper, in an unprecedented evolution of his photographic journey. In fact, the photographs will be combined with paintings and sculptures, created by Benassi himself inspired by the important La Spezia painter Agostino Fossati (La Spezia, 1830 - 1904), whom he loved and saw as an inspiration from which to better understand himself, his own career path and his relationship with the city. Much of the material that makes up the exhibition is unpublished, conceived and created specifically for the project through a process of creation in the making. Jacopo Benassi curated every single aspect of the project, from the works to the guiding image of the communication, which he conceived and designed as a true work of art.

“It was in La Spezia that Jacopo met the person who would change his life, photographer Sergio Fregoso: in fact, attending one of his courses, he fell in love with photography,” writes curator Grulli in the critical text accompanying the exhibition. "It is Fregoso who makes him understand how this medium is primarily a way to express a vision of the world and, as Jacopo often recounts, what it means to stand behind and in front of the lens. With him he shares a love for a particular place in the city, Piazza Brin, around which Jacopo has lived for many years, so much so that it has become his ’studio outside the studio.’ For the exhibition Benassi started from a kind of degree zero, from his first photographs of La Spezia’s public gardens stolen at night during walks that, even before being excursions to a precise urban place, were journeys of discovery and unveiling of one’s spirit. To those refer the shots of empty city details in the exhibition, in which human presence is completely absent, in which those elements usually neglected become protagonists. There is its sea, captured not as an element of the landscape but in detail, in its small tame waves, with its foam, and then there are the weeds, the plants, the night bushes, a stupendous agave jutting out, the drainage canal that divides the city from the Arsenal, the true Matrix site of the entire city: the (unvisitable) city within the city, from which everything originated, of which it occupies a large part and of whose city life it is still the engine. It is as if Jacopo wants to show us the city that is his alone, where everyone else disappears, the one in which no one wants to ’inhabit’ because no one knows, no one sees, or no one is interested in seeing. These are signs of an intimate, exclusive, almost filial relationship dense with jealousy. And Jacopo’s mother is powerfully present in this exhibition - she passed away just in the days of preparation - and manages to become its keystone through two shots: the photograph of her bedside table, striped by cigarette burns placed on it over the years, and that of a detail of the wall above the same bed in which only the imprint of a removed painting remains."

The exhibition is open Tuesday through Sunday with free admission: in April and May from 4 to 9 p.m., in June and June from 6 to 10 p.m. (Monday, April 25 open). Jacopo Benassi is among the leading Italian photographers of the last generation. Over the years he has exhibited in Italy and abroad in important museums and private galleries. He has collaborated with leading intellectuals and cultural figures such as, to name a few, director Paolo Sorrentino, Asia Argento, Maurizio Maggiani, with whom he has created books and projects of various kinds. His work ranges from photography, his medium of choice, to sculpture and installation, through editorial work. In recent years he has worked with performance, creating shows presented at numerous festivals. Except for brief periods, he has always maintained his studio in La Spezia. Recently Jacopo Benassi has also been engaged as a lecturer at prestigious universities such as the IUAV in Venice and the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti NABA in Milan.

La Spezia, Jacopo Benassi's homecoming with Matrix exhibition

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