Vasco Bendini

Vasco Bendini was born in Bologna in 1922.
In 1940 he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of Florence, and then moved on to the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna, where his teachers were Giorgio Morandi and Virgilio Guidi.
Introduced by Guidi, he made his debut at the Bergamini gallery in Milan in 1949, while the early fifties marked the start of the exhibition activity of his mature period, with one-man shows at the La Torre gallery in Florence, 1953, at the Milione gallery in Milan, 1956 and 1958, at the Saletta in Modena, 1956, at the Attico in Rome, 1959, 1961, 1963, at the Apollinaire in Milan, 1961, at the Mc Roberts & Tunnard in London, 1963, and his first participation in 1956 at the 28th Venice Biennale.
At the same time he took part in important collective shows, such as
Giovani Artisti Italiani (Young Italian Artists) at the Permanente in Milan, and Nuove tendenze dell'arte italiana (New Trends in Italian Art) in Rome - New York Art Foundation, Rome, 1958; Possibilità di relazione (Possibilities of Relation) at the Attico in Rome, 1960, the Mostra della critica italiana (Italian Critics Show) in Milan in 1961, Nuove Prospettive della Pittura Italiana (New Prospects in Italian Painting) at Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, 1962, and L'Informale in Italia fino al 1957 (The Informel in Italy up to 1957) in Livorno in 1963.
In 1964 he had his own room at the 32nd Venice Biennale, and another at the 36th Biennale in 1972.
In 1968 he held his first retrospective at the InArch, Palazzo Taverna, Rome. In 1972 he was given a personal room at the exhibition La Ricerca Estetica dal ’60 al ’70 (Aesthetic Research from '60 to '70), X Quadriennale Nazionale d'Arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.
Dating to 1973, the year he moved to Rome, are the major shows at the Istituto di Storia dell'Arte of the University of Parma and in the Sala Comunale of Alessandria. These were followed by shows at the Museum of Modern Art of Saarbrucken, 1976, at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Bologna, 1978, at the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, 1984, at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan and at Palazzo Forti in Verona, 1989, culminating in the triple show at the Galleria Civica of Modena, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Bologna and the Galleria Civica of Trento in 1992.
In the same period, among the numerous collective shows, we would mention Arte in Italia I960 – 1977 (Art in Italy 1960 - 1977), Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Turin, 1977. L'Informale in Italia (The Informel in Italy), Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, 1983, and Pittura e Realtà (Painting and Reality), Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, 1993.
1996 witnessed an extensive one-man show at the Loggetta Lombardesca in Ravenna and the exhibition of lithographic works at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome.
Other important retrospectives were held in 1998 at the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, at the La Sapienza University of Rome; in 1999 at Palazzo Sarcinelli di Conegliano and in 2001 at the Castello di Masnago, Varese. In 2000 he was among the artists selected for the exhibition Novecento, arte e storia in Italia (Twentieth century: Art and History in Italy), at the Scuderie Papali at the Quirinale and the Mercati di Traiano, Rome. Two of his works were displayed at the exhibition La pittura degli anni Cinquanta in Italia (Italian Painting of the Fifties), held at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Turin (May-June 2003), and were then acquired for the permanent collections of the Turin gallery. 2003 also saw the inauguration of an extensive retrospective at the Museo di Lissone, curated by Gualdoni, and a one-man show at the Museo Bocchi in Parma, curated by Ivo Iori. In the autumn of 2005 recent works were presented at the Galleria de’ Foscherari in Bologna. In March 2006 Bendini participated with four works from the early Fifties at the show Dal Romanticismo all’Informale (From Romanticism to the Informel) – a tribute to Francesco Arcangeli, curated by Claudio Spadoni – at the Loggetta Lombardesca in Ravenna; in April a one-man show at the Spaziosenzatitolo cultural association in Rome was inaugurated, with an introductory article by Massimo Arioli; in June 2006 he was invited by Gabriele Simongini to the show on Astrattismo italiano 1910-1970 (Italian Abstractism 1910-1970),  held at the Archaeological Museum in Chieti; in July he participated with works from the Fifties in the collective show Una natura altra (A Different Nature), set up by Sergio Troisi in the former convent of the Carmine in Marsala. In September of the same year, Gabriele Simongini again curated the retrospective entitled L’immagine accolta (The Received Image), presenting works ranging from 1951 to 2006 in the Roman gallery Casa d’arte Ulisse. The exhibition catalogue was accompanied by a monographic article by Edoardo Piersensini entitled Fra il nulla e l’infinito (Between the Void and the Infinite). In October 2006 Giorgio Cortenova wrote the introduction for the catalogue of another retrospective, Il respiro della materia (The Breath of Matter), which was held in the La Giarina gallery in Verona. Since 1999 Bendini has lived and worked between Parma and Rome.

Still lifes where the objects breathe like flashes, but feeble, slowed, spacious; a few shapes of faces, almost dazed veronica’s veils, where the shaft of a nose, the orbit of a forehead, appear to hint at a grand and solitary architectural rhythm, or a slightly staring eye weeps shadows: languid and wind-filled sails, stretched on the blue of troubled waters: and the recollection of the sea, dreamt by now as in a distant mirage, clear and yet veiled with emotion: these, just indicated, are some of the subjects of Bendini’s painting.
(Francesco Arcangeli, 1953)

The image densifies, corrugating itself into mossy craters where, between the cells of the rough fabric, the light tacks out the woof of vibrant haloes; or frayed like gauzy milky ways, thinned into flakes and blisters, it is rearranged in a broad chiaroscuro movement. Then there also emerged paintings that were all black, of dark matter crammed almost in an anxiety of confession, where the trace, the image, laboriously disengaged itself amidst shackles of shadow or just a few flashes of red.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 1959)

But already towards the end of 1957 and early in 1958 matter dilutes and disappears to cede again to exiguous tempera. The silent and lacerating movements of light as if dissolving in those penetrating vibrations, the palpitations sunk in the depth of the impasto, while retrieving their organic fluidity, suggest to Bendini a freer and more unencumbered theme. A theme possibly less directly autobiographical while even more closely bound up with his own interior configuration which, already from the temperas of 1951 and various essays of ’56 had come to approach the fully and spiritually illuminating problem of a relation between the emanation of thought and the receptivity of the senses, betwixt absorption and impulse, and finally between sentiment and gesture: scraps of light, splitting of shadows; headway of expanding masses; constellating breakdowns, delicate collisions, secret articulations. The unexpected and subtle dialectic of the “formless” that Bendini’s temperas constantly propose as pure image is ransomed by a pathetic solitude in the vitality of the fantasy.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 1959)

For example, the neo-Renaissance certainty of Guidi’s seascapes disappears entirely to make way for a unsteady and precarious space encamped with shadows, stains, smoke signals of uncertain definition and position, fleeting and unstable. From the proud affirmation of substance and essence proper to the twentieth-century we shift to an extremely changeful manifestation of phenomenalism: a phenomenalism, however, which at least for the moment is not an end in itself, absolute protagonist of the painting, but rather harks back to an ambit of spiritualist, mediumistic “presences”. In these beginnings, effectively, Bendini does not conceal his intention to practice a visionary art.  
(Renato Barilli, 1960)

So this is the key: in the production of each of Bendini’s paintings there is an immanent transcendental structure, a mesh of fundamental relations. However, although an essence presides over his paintings, this does not lead him to fall into essentialism. Bendini lives in the late twentieth century, and is hence well immunised against the, albeit generous, illusion of the artists of the first decades of the century that they could come to grasp the transcendental form itself, notwithstanding its congruent identification with the accidents of existence. On the contrary, he knows that it can only be reached by incorporating it into a matter, a texture of events that are strictly chromatic, pictorial. In a word, what happens is that the transcendental structure, far from imposing itself as something preconstituted and given once and for all, morphs into a heuristic instrument to go and seek out and fix a vast series of material accidents, of luminous phenomena.  
(Renato Barilli, 1961)


The symbolic signs that presupposed an all too intellectualised elaboration are by now undone, dissolved along the entire space in luminous haloes: slender shadows, reiterated semblances of objects reveal themselves faintly against the undifferentiated background, and the “still lifes” show us not the things but the persistence of their luminous image in the consciousness, like the imprints of an undefined substance, poetic residues of an impression by now devoid of matter.
(Roberto Tassi, 1961)

At the time “naturalism of participation”, “the sense of the two” was spoken of. Bendini felt his days less taut by moralistic anxiety, less stiffly painful, and abandoned himself willingly to a broader scope, a subtle sweetness of emotions. Livid breaths of spring dimmed his canvas, green coagulations of light, gilded vapours of mists, white-grey glares of snow passed over them like phantoms. He even ran the risk of an overly great dispersion, of a forlorn lyricism. But in a group of works, that still survive, in which the voice of nature harmonised with his ancient angst, his desperate tremors, the subtle and rigorous poetry of his indistinct splotching, of his volumes corroded and corrupted by the light, of his spaces dissolved and absorbed in the image, resurfaced with silent immediacy, rendered if anything more vivid by a new chromatic intensity.
(Roberto Tassi, 1961)


Instead what we could say, reversing current terminology, is that for him escape or evasion is precisely the way he gets out of himself. His faith as a living man urges him to face the encounter with the theory of modern naturalism or realism, but this does not exhaust his thirst to “be”. It is this thirst, this impatience, that nearly always saves the tension of Bendini’s so-called “abstract” paintings. For him a chromatic lake is “a lake of the heart”, a movement of impalpable tones and the subtle, veiled, intriguing stirring of conscience. A contrast in chiaroscuro or a monochrome obsession coincide with the drama of his feelings. This is the source, on his best days, of his “quality”, and certainly not his ability to be diaphanous, or precious, to create exquisite circles or imperceptible eddies. He has talent enough to achieve all this consummately even when the strain of his exhausting struggle makes itself felt, the need for pause surfaces and the moving force behind the painting slackens its tension.
(Francesco Arcangeli, 1963)

Bendini’s image strikes internally, like an essential instant of consciousness, similar to those treacherous instants that appear to be yielding up an illumination, and just as impeded from identifying itself externally as those illuminations are from becoming tangible. The effort of synthesis to which the eye is enticed, beyond or rather through the dispersal of the material flow, retraces the stages of a complex recognition, almost the agony of the image in its consuming evolution, its tangling in the knot of memory, its splintering into infinite, volatile identifications of the essence in the existence. The reading of the paintings therefore consists in discovering among the uncertain data this vague but dense image, mostly of a face, or in any case of identifying a central embryo among the subtle stirrings of light and shadow, of signs, between the brief spurts of matter, between the flakes and the coagulations, the rarefactions and the liquescences. And it is, precisely, a question of perceiving the image, not so much as a representative allusion, but rather as an operation of synthesis in which the eye is driven by these very, manifold, even imperceptible, stirrings that are substantially convergent to the very extent that, in discovering and elaborating them, they appear to us divergent and each in itself absorbent.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 1964),

There are figurative fragments: a chair, a window, human contours, glimpses of sky. But I don’t see the jubilation, destined to turn to tears, of the propagandists of the “new figuration”: these vain shadows of persons and things, brought thus far by the caprice of an obscure current, will never take shape, they will fade much sooner than others because, in the dimension of the non-existent, their very physical nature renders them infinitely fragile and fleeting. Finally, there are patches of colour that preserve and pass on the last trace of a material impasto or a gestural action: but the matter is devoid of substance, the gesture devoid of strength. The relations too are inverted: the brightest and most luminous colour is the black, the sky that we see from the window is on this side of the wall.
(Giulio Carlo Argan, 1966)

In the “solar” cabin the visual sensation of the light in progression is shored up by the thermal sensation and integrated by the olfactory. It is closed and yet recalls the open air, the beach, nature enjoyed through the skin; at the same time it is a closed space, of growth, where time has a purely organic rhythm; or, again, it is like the cranium where thoughts are elaborated and all sensations gather, forming perception.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 1968)

From now on, what will take place in Bendini’s painting is as I see it to be understood only in this sense: nothing, directly, of the visible world; the return, in the light of sudden clear and prolonged glimmers, of the faded, baleful and enveloping shadows of an abysmal planet of the imagination. And yet a lake of blues swells the waves of a luminous storm, or reposes on the violet water of a distant mooring by now almost evening: that is the ultimate shudder of solitude, fusing its own reserve, like a shameful and private vice, into the colours of the sun.   
(Flavio Caroli, 1972)

In that tonality, a swift and slavering matter, darkening on the face and lighter for veilings on the flesh, immersed the body in its melancholic and heart-rending placenta; in the moist light of a gilded and delicate season, a momentary respite from solitude.
(Flavio Caroli, 1972)

Opaque, arid surfaces, or bright and swarming (oil colour is being used again) that revoke the marbled energy of a billow that breaks shattering into a thousand fragments of light and shadow.
(Marisa Vescovo, 1973)

In the adolescent clarity or the tart candour of the reaches, there nestles solitary and almost mute a species of disciplined, adhesive alchemy (devoid of reference to cycles of retrieval, revival, or pursuit of the themes proper to historic alchemy). There was in this a statement of symbolic naturalness, almost didactic in its dominant conflict of nigredo-albedo, lux-in-tenebris, lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt, or the ultimate, eschatological solvency of corporality within the layers of light: the "firmamentum" and its plenary metamorphosis; field of the spatia calida, boundless, lost regions, imposable  confines: a topology naturally similar to its source, to its destiny as surface, as moistened epidermis (mundum ros genuit), as disjointed river-bed of the unequivocal, rarefied and precarious continence of the  unum.
(Emilio Villa, 1980)

The nexus of the light thus sews the field of the Apollonian air, sine tempore, saeculum seculi, transparent cuttings of the millennium imminens-eminens, immanens-emanens, immanans-emanans, minans pulvis. Like the glance grazing a fraction of immemorial and causeless wind, without the se causa sui, the se welcome and hostile spectre, where the flight consumed from the centre is the only effect of the non-cause, non-caused shadow.
This shadow is the quest and image, the inquest and signal that the painting operates. As if it wished to create an unknown principle of minimum energy for maximum instability.
(Emilio Villa, 1980)

Gold dust: it is not enough to apply gold dust when everyone can become beautiful by touching its untouchable light, Bendini uses it in an apparently distracted manner, but his use is reckless, I would dare to say experimental in relation to the image. Every picture creates a horizon, comes away from the naturalistic effect by forcing the colour to reveal itself with continual shifts-blockages or fading.
(Claudio Cerritelli, 1983)

Space evaporates, becomes liquid, goes back to being inconsistent and realises that around every presence it has a weight made of nothingness, only what Bendini allows to show through at the very edges of perception, between a trail of light and an area of emulsion.
(Claudio Cerritelli, 1983)

At this point, pearly greys, diluted blues, cold whites or pale pinks were to come into play, like a Narcissus coming in to study his own image on an undulating sheet of water. Now the dear image of the face blends in more and more along the shivery ripples of the surface, and, at times, is totally abducted by a flash of light. Little by little the face almost totally disappears into a mysterious background. Only a minimum sign remains, the slightest of breaks, imperceptible and confused by this sea of waves, playing and becoming more and more psychic and existential.
(Alessandra Borgogelli, 1987)

And so these lakes or whirlpools of painting explode, hurriedly, joyously, furiously: they explode with the gold and greys, greens, reds, and blacks that fill them, until saturation point, with a high-pitched scream. With peaks and chasms, slipping and sharply rearing, it extends the space and makes it grow: unmindful of this or another nature, made of places never trodden, seen or dreamed, but only extended out of all proportion – beyond any confines we could possibly have experienced – by the violence of the gesture, the saturation of the material, the blinding of the light. And so, today, Bendini forgets and possesses his past.
(Fabrizio D'Amico, 1989)

Bendini has in fact always skilfully avoided lapsing into a heavy painting, preferring to insist upon a light world grasped in the most subtle vibrations, where the painting is ready to dissolve immediately after having fixed the swiftest of traces or hinted at nuclei of matter, immediately corrected by the light.
(Alessandra Borgogelli, 1989)

In this light, the evaporation of the pigmented water, the surfacing of the face/self-portrait, then the trace of an image or later the softness of glass wool, the warmth of straw or polyester, represent the sole and in any case necessary self-defence of a lost and precarious ego that retrieves its identity in the alchemical metaphor of language: of its immortality.
(Giorgio Cortenova, 1989)

Bendini addresses his reflection to the sensitive experience of the world and the poetic rendering of its expressive density, starting from these clear poles of triangulation. His is a reasoning of space, first and foremost, as a site of flow between the prime projectile thrust of the sensation and the abstract depth of consciousness that adverts it: hence a space that is not ordained, postulated, conditional, but perceived right from the genetic clot prior to the process as tension, and relation, as suspended drama. And that space is materialised and identified by light, light/colour, not by transcription or translation, but by its own specific quality and vocation that realises its distinctive features and gestures.
(Flaminio Gualdoni, 1992)

Acting again on the basis of a fairly vast spectrum of problematic impulses – the absolute and muffled blackness, the desperate hardness, of certain works; the polychrome clamour reduced to a dazed and panting silence in others, the liquid and neurotic washing away of the shades in others – he allows himself to resolve the question of the surfacing to semblance of the form again by way of light.
(Flaminio Gualdoni, 1992)

Apart from a few rare gouaches (“but executed with the tip of the brush, intended as a drawing”) that throb with a fairly recognisable echo of Matisse, singularly melded with recollections of an ‘old’ abstract code, somewhere between Arp and Magnelli, and veined with Surrealism, the temperas between ’50 and ’53, and then again those of ’56, appear to distance all authoritative support and display themselves, almost in an undertone, to their own solitary ‘candid’ word.
These are itineraries interrupted by a black sign, which at the same time rejects the rhetorically thirsty syntax of Hartung and the definitive gesture of Kline: “unhinged strokes of black” which, waiving declamation, instead whisper their anxious voices, their almost fumbling quest of the space. Or liquid descents of irresolute colour, harmonised in tone (blacks and greys; pinks, whites and greens spread on the pale yellow of the sheet); impalpable, diaphanous spatial intermissions; grids, without bodily weight, drawn upon the page so that the light can seep through.
(Fabrizio D’Amico, 1993)

It is above all the quest for light that sustains the works of ’59 and ’60. Light which, as in a few of the ’52 papers, oozes at points onto the surface, slow, pearled with haloes and infinite transparencies. These are, again and more, the certain epiphanies of ambiguous and fluttering images; or again, Veronicas of an interior dimension poised between dream and memory, opening hesitantly upon the verges of life. Sometimes the small amount of colour, harmonised with the pale light, is bewitched by a gentle, almost exhausted transition of tone, and at other times, more dramatically, from a fused abyss of darkness, as if from an unbridged distance, there surfaces the tremulous glimmer of a light.
(Fabrizio D’Amico, 1993)

Thus the black burgeons into dense, strong reaches, at times vexed and almost clotted. It is the sumptuous black of Roman Baroque, we could say; and then the white, of a fullness without suspicions and shadows, of a variability of tone stretching as far as haughty candour: these are the new meanings of the latest Bendini.
The events of the white, innerved with sky blue, and pink, and yellow and ochre irritations, map out a density here calcified here swollen by the movements of the black, stratified, veined with run-offs and imprints, led towards a grey of unspeakable lights, such as never happened before.
(Flaminio Gualdoni, 1993)

And thus the labour of generation of the image is reduced to a flow of coagulations and receding gleams, of ripe growths and concluding erosions, of clots of a potential taking shape and an indistinct flooding, that spread and are fixed in the opaque blackness as in the severe atony of the browns, of the exhausted violets, of the greens, ultra-artificial and in themselves autres...
(Flaminio Gualdoni, 1995)

The stroke is the becoming present-absent of the full to the empty and vice-versa: the stroke is a presence that articulates a non-presence. It constitutes, perhaps, the equivalent of the nuance, so important in the paintings on aluminium and in the large canvases of the Ballata: the continual differentiation of the luminous  quanta that dynamise the interspatial relation between the different colours of the spectrum.
(Silvia Pegoraro, 1996)

Bendini’s painting, a self-existing essence, now shows itself as the hypothesis of a non static natura naturans, as the presentation of a generative action, as the revelation of the creative potential of colour and sign in the intuition of a space-time in progress.
It seems that we can discern a remote romantic recollection, possibly at times distantly resembling Turner, who dissolves the image in a different, whirling luminous vibration and refraction which, in a space that is no longer defined by perspective, suggests natural appearances not of finished figures, but as meteorological valency, filtered through a Panic memory of perception, in a new “natural sublime”.
(Rosalba Zuccaro, 1996)

If the space of the performance “symbolically represents the space and the scope conceded to man” in a physical and concluded existential dimension, more spacious reaches to be pictorially objectified in “metaphysical” images are pressing in his anxious research of the Seventies.
And now, in La ballata dei dieci cieli, these are unfurled in a broad tempo, with fields pulsating with colours nuanced by the wind and modulated by the light, with trajectories oscillating in sprays of vibrations or lines of sensitive impulses, in the mysterious dream turned real of a ballad that sings, with a melodic form fully erudite in harmonising the grammatical and syntactical elements of his language, an emotion purified by the mind and by a matter become light.
(Rosalba Zuccaro, 1996)

And now the paste of the colours collapses, the clamour and the sudden lightings, the gems and the burnt lights that made Bendini’s “informel” image sumptuous decline. He returns to replacing the ‘full house’ that was with the eroded and vacuous space of the bare canvas, on which the signs are scattered sparse, poor and almost reticent. The light leaks to the surface at points: slow and pearled with rings; at times, at other times, more dramatically, from a fused abyss of darkness, as if from an unbridged distance, there surfaces the tremulous glimmer of a light.
(Fabrizio D’Amico, 1998)

Finding the colour: first the gold that tunes with the garnet and collides with the blacks, then the blacks themselves that slowly encroach upon ever greater portions of the surface until they reach the silent tempest of the canvas of 1994, a vortex of dramatic intensity that unleashes white gleams, and a red flash, and an aperture allows a rose of flesh and light to appear from the depths.  
(Walter Guadagnini, 1998)

Therefore, his work is entirely grounded on the sense of time, so as to link, moving backwards, death with birth, darkness with light. Along this harsh, and yet intriguing journey, he has given us, miraculously, like slight flashes, cracks of light and of shadow. All that it seems possible for us to ask.
(Marco Goldin, 1999)

And so he chooses his typical scale of non-colours, or rather, non-descriptive, non-evocative, or even symbolic colours/light, the only life given through their relationship with light: it is, in turn, an internal light, the opposite of physical light, but it is not tempted by second-hand metaphysics, with the light weightlessness of dry materials of a sweetened and simple thinness. Light of a mental climate which does not make possible appearances, but in the end pure revelation.
(Flaminio Gualdoni, 2003)

As he has always done, Vasco Bendini claims his painter’s “poem”, if by poem we understand that interior expression of a breath that grasps the surface like a hand clasped upon a wall, as an imprint in the winter frost betrays the passage of a life concealed in the mists of the light.
(Giorgio Cortenova, 2006)

Dating in fact to 1956 is the encounter with matter, where the intersection with the signs becomes dialogue and a transfer of animation from the gesture to the manipulation of the impasto, and vice-versa, as in the reciprocal recognition of a common origin from the depths, creating a ferment and communication of points-matter, a movement of large clots or flakes, animated differently each time by the light. The achievement is the suggestion of that ineffable spiritual dialogue between concentration and emanation, which I have so often (vainly) attempted to grasp in my writings. Thought of an almost ascetic root which, also effectively matured through texts on meditation, acquires a sensitive body.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 2007)

Fraying vapours, vibrating splinters of colour, but immediately curdled in the centring movement of the light, or within the hollow of the shadow, as in a deep systole. Thus the image “makes itself”, is composed, despite its trembling intermittencies, magnetised by its initial fulcrum.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 2007)

Spaces in time or out of time? The infinite is a time that goes beyond time, it is a space that goes beyond dimensions. This feeling of intimate community between the two extremes appears now to inspire Bendini’s expansive and masterful painting, looking out as it were over an illumination of immensity.
(Maurizio Calvesi, 2007)
 

Reflections on origins like those on the “last things”, even today in the face of the euphoria of excess that distinguishes our time, still appear like an invitation to a meditating concentration on the brink of brinks. This latter may perhaps be one of the reasons why Bendini wants us to see his paintings immersed in half-light, so as not to distract us, and frontal to their diaphanous interrogating irradiation.
(Bruno Corà, 2008)