Curated by Maurizio Calvesi

“I had the strength or, perhaps, the good fortune not to give in to any blackmailing bargains. I started to meet all my most secret needs, knowing that I had to give up economic advantages. Perhaps many laugh at this, and perhaps many doubt it, but I believe that if one wants to be free in a social context, and learn to coexist with the different, one cannot help but behave in this way.”

Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to present to the public an anthological exhibition, curated by Maurizio Calvesi, documenting over fifty years of activity by one of the protagonists of Italian art: Vasco Bendini.

The exhibition retraces the fundamental stages of the artist's pictorial journey, starting from his early informal works, in which the influence of Guidi and Morandi, who were his masters, is indirectly felt, up to his recent works. Already in his early works, an extraordinary originality emerges forcefully, which Francesco Arcangeli immediately realized when he presented Bendini in Florence in 1953. 
As early as the 1950s, Bendini tackled the theme of the face, interpreting it as an archetype, as a universal figure, capable of achieving that climate of abstraction to which he was constantly led. At the end of 1956, painting became material and, later, with a slight change of perspective, gestural, excluding any representative dimension from the canvas. From '62 to '65, with the Ipotesi Ultime [Latest Assumptions] and Senso Operante [Operating Sense] series, Bendini turned to the canvas as a place of design, a research that took him “outside” the painting and prepared him for the choice of a temporary renunciation of painting.

The exhibition shows some fundamental works from this period, which can be traced back to the Poor Art formula, such as Ombre prime [First shadows] (1966), in which the shadows of a frame and a chair projected on the wall become the dominant theme, and Cabina Solare [Solar Cabin] (1967), a wooden cabin in which the spectator is greeted by a chronometric disk that lights up in sectors and is invaded by the smell of wax and resin released by tautological neon writings (a work that can already be ascribed to the object-behavioural area).

From '67 onwards, the recovery of the two-dimensional surface takes place through the collection of elements and materials with the appearance of waste that show the poetic solitude of the everyday object, a metaphor of an ego that recognizes itself in the poor value of these existential traces: hooks, cigarette butts, sheets, cotton wool, glass wool. From this period, among others, some works from the series Oggetti come storia [Objects as history] ('67-'68) and Il dardo del Cherubino [The Cherub's Dart] (1974), made of wadding and glass wool stretched on canvas, are on show.

From the end of the 1970s Bendini re-examined the foundations of his artistic language and reworked his existential and operational research. Using aluminium, paper and canvas, the artist resumed his research on color, which became a secret, silent, enveloping sign.

The paintings of his last period are large pictorial surfaces, with broad color spreads, that involve the viewer and stimulate him on both a sensorial perceptive level and on an imaginative, poetic and rationally ethical level. And it is Vasco Bendini who, speaking of the conversation that opens between the viewer and the work, expresses himself as follows: “The artist's willingness to interact should be assumed as habitual behavior by the viewers. Only then would things change. One avoids knowing from the other how to interpret the art object. One opens up dialogue, one evaluates, one compares, one consults on the meaning of the work.”