Frittelli arte contemporanea pays tribute to Vasco Bendini on the fifth anniversary of his death. The exhibition Vasco Bendini. Io che cammino [Vasco Bendini. Me walking] reconstructs an almost complete portrait of an artist who, through painting, carried out a true inner denudation - a battle with his own ego in a oscillation between abandonment and resistance - representing his dreaming, meditating, and feeling.

For Bendini, “the origin of making is in itself, where the memory of the image settles” and the meaning of this making - to which he would dedicate his entire life - is resolved in the discovery, in the unveiling of the image that is, even before it appears.

The exhibition is articulated as a walk through some of the most significant episodes of his artistic career, starting with his first research on sign and matter in the 1950s.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he interrupted painting, and began the season of investigation - like Paolini in Turin and Kounellis in Rome - into the tools of pictorial language: brushes, color, canvas, frame, drawing, perspective, light, shadows, sign, object and representation. From here, material and object-based works will come to life, but also immaterial and performative works of great impact, with which he will give form and substance to the ethical and philosophical role of the artist and his making.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1970 work, Io che cammino [Me walking], which together with Io che guardo [Me looking] is a programmatic declaration of the recovery of the pictorial surface, of the quest to give an account of an inner reality emblematized through that primary gestural technique that had been his main tool from the beginning.

In the artworks of the following decades, Bendini implemented an accomplished and disenchanted questioning of his entire existential and operative story. The theme of memory returns in many of his titles, consisting of dates that underline the almost diary-like value assumed by his final cycles, an existential diary that eschews any sort of anecdote. The figures that emerge from his images are uniquely mindful of the material that produced them and that makes them not only similar to dreams, but also to living, biological reality in the making. At the same time, his paintings touch the strings of sensitivity, the profoundly human sphere of feeling, calling up memories of the everyday in the viewer's mind.

“The more there is silence, the more there is light.” (Vasco Bendini)