Benni Bosetto : Tête en l'air - Viewing Room

Tête en l'air is Benni Bosetto's first exhibition with the gallery. The show revolves around the idea of distraction as a mental state that allows unexpected connections between the swinging moments of focus and drift.

Inspired by the holy iconography of the Italian Renaissance, Benni Bosetto creates enigmatic sculptures and drawings on silk that serve as containers for ‘divinely useless’ experiences. A concealed language, a form of mystery emerges throughout the gallery's space leading the visitors to feel constantly off track, turn their heads and change their gaze as lost in a fragment of the artist’s reverie.

The exhibition opens with "Diviners continue to search for water", a small plaster case that brings to mind the shape of an airplane window. The viewer is invited to look inside the case and immerse in a forest of dried pomegranate branches from which body fragments, arms, legs and bronze ears grow. The wandering eye in this intricate landscape recalls the mental state of idly looking out the airplane's window under the dizzying effect of pressurized air. It is during these fleeting moments that the mind begins to wander distractedly and to feel somehow part of the whole, aware that reality is changeable depending on one's point of view.

The works on silk are inhabited by a multiplicity of unicellular organisms, humans, animals, saints, and visceral parasites all interconnected by biomechanical pipes that pass through their orifices to form a single living system. The drawings are freely executed by the artist directly on silk, mounted on cotton and framed in a handmade steel frame which give them a sculptural quality.

When they are not absorbed in some kind of reflection, Benni Bosetto's characters are grappling with a series of ritual gestures and self-care exercises. The body reveals itself here as the origin of perception, the source of material knowledge and the holder of an intergenerational memory.

Thought on a cosmic, social and personal scale, Bosetto’s diary is often the source of her titles, sometimes extracted from a book or an article that has distracted her, aware that meaning is to be found between the interstices of reality, where distractions reside, when the head is in the clouds.

The third room consists of a forest of bronze and ceramic sculptures from which a baroque profusion of jewels, amulets, magic and devotional objects emerge. Hanging from the ceiling or resting on the floor, the works result from a combination of different aesthetic registers, ranging from the iconography of Carlo Crivelli and his impudent cucumbers and fruits, to the lightness and airiness of Fausto Melotti's sculptures.

The works in the exhibition highlight an enigmatic repertoire of accessories and talismans that refer to the genre of grotesques, a type of pictorial wall decoration dating back to ancient Rome, characterized by the depiction of hybrid and monstrous beings intertwined with geometric and naturalistic decorative elements.

"Anima (Soul, 2020) is an environmental and sound installation that evokes the human presence in absence. Filled with voices and sounds, the room seems abandoned, yet it evokes myths and quantic narrations. The torn wallpaper exposes drawings on the wall, while on the ground, amidst dust and waste, ceramic sculptures are reminiscent of organisms or organic elements. Bosetto rereads the dematerialization of the body, its transcending the space-time continuum and its becoming the image of a perennial becoming." - FUORI, Quadriennale d'Arte di Roma, 2020

"For her first show in London, Benni Bosetto presents a new performance at Kunstraum that explores the transformative power of magical thinking through carefully designed sets, sounds and choreographed gestures. Developed and performed with Xenia Perek, the work combines diverse streams of research - trance, behavioural codes, magic, the primitive - to construct a different experience of daily rituals of labour and time. " - Giulia Civardi for Kunstraum, London

"When reality isn’t quite enough for us, we begin to explore our own associations, contemplating conterfectuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head.

The project consists in creating a narrative device composed of several elements: a set design, characters, symbolic elements and a pending estate script. Building a fictional space, the artist clears the imagination of reconstructing the story from its origins through the use of drawing, the first tool of the human expression, and paper. " - TILE Project Space, Milan