Art | “Sediamoci qui” by Giulio Bensasson
Fungi, organisms of decomposition become artists of their time.
Divario 13 January—4 March 2023
Rome, Italy
From January 13th to March 4th 2023, Divario www.divario.space—the especial art nucleus in Rome—presents “Sediamoci qui” (Let’s sit here), an immersive solo show by Giulio Bensasson (Rome, 1990), Italian artist whose practice evolves through the language of sculpture and installations, with special focus on multimedia technologies and above all on experimentation with new materials.
A recurring theme in Giulio Bensasson’s art is time, which in many of his works takes on a leading role, represented as the culminating moment of an act or as a latent and inexorable process, accompanied by an obsession with decay and decadence.
On show, are six photographic reproductions on paper and three lightboxes from an archive “Non so dove, non so quando” and an installation “Come funghi”, in dialogue with the space of the gallery made up of over 100 sculptures in pink silicon that evoke the shapes of wood cluster mushrooms, even imitating their proliferation, but produced with the texture, color and material of sex toys.
Moldy slides, old films the artist collected through a series of fortuitous finds in damp basements, abandoned warehouses and at stands in vintage markets, have been enlarged and printed on paper or lightbox. Small photographic images, which initially captured a well-defined moment of reality, are now almost entirely destroyed by the continual process of decomposition by mold and bacteria.
Giulio Bensasson transforms someone’s memories into the representation of memory itself, as it crumbles, transmutes, and takes on ambiguous, indecipherable forms, generating unknown worlds and micro-universes of colour.
The sense of suspension and indeterminacy of the exhibition title: “Sediamoci qui”(Let’s sit here), inspired by the final scene of the film The Thing (1982), by John Carpenter, insinuates the anxieties that belong to Giulio Bensasson and his generation; anxieties in the face of which, sometimes, one is not given the possibility of choosing between patient waiting and unconditional surrender.
More info: www.divario.space