GENOA.- On view at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa is Jacopo Benassi Libero!, the major solo exhibition dedicated to the photographer’s most recent work, bringing together over one hundred pieces created over the past seven years of activity.

The exhibition – curated by Francesco Zanot and set up in the spaces of the Loggia degli Abati from 12 July to 14 September – takes stock of Benassi’s most recent research, from 2018 to today, focusing on the key stages that led him to develop a personal, complex, and recognizable language in which photography, sculpture, painting, music, and performance converge. At the heart of the exhibition project is the work of deconstructing the body of photography and photographic vision.

Through a large-scale installation that connects and intertwines over one hundred works — including some of the artist’s most iconic pieces and previously unseen productions — the exhibition questions the role of photography today and its ability to resist and engage with the contemporary. For Jacopo Benassi, photography is not merely a tool of representation, but primarily one of action and transformation, with the image as an open device.

By presenting the most characteristic and recurring subjects of Benassi’s work — from portraits to underground music venues, from the most mundane everyday objects to fragments of nature — the exhibition reflects on the relationship between image, medium, and context, challenging the primacy of the image over everything else. It’s a matter of hierarchies (which are torn apart), contamination (used as a strategy for emancipation and knowledge), and freedom. In an era when photography has reached the height of its dissemination while simultaneously being threatened by generative systems producing photorealistic images, Benassi responds to this contradiction.

Seven years of bold experimentation in over one hundred works

The exhibition Jacopo Benassi Libero! retraces the photographer’s last seven years of research through a journey of over one hundred works that reveal his intense and extensive work with photography and, above all, on photography itself.

Since 2018, Jacopo Benassi has begun combining independent and distinct photographs within double, triple, and multiple frames that he personally creates using reclaimed materials. It is a rejection of the single image as an icon and photography as a pure (immaterial) image. Here, one cannot speak of diptychs, triptychs, or polyptychs, because these are not photographs designed to be together, but rather clashes, encounters, incidents—more or less violent and explosive. Whether the results appear as entirely sensible combinations or pure semantic deliriums, they are always the result of disruptive actions: against each specific photograph and against anyone who would seek to find any kind of confirmation within it. A triumph of naked and imperfect bodies, Benassi’s work lays photography bare, revealing its impotence.

Another strategy of accumulation is represented by a photograph of a wax statue of Hitler made at Madame Tussaud’s in London, placed on a cart and hidden behind such a large number of glass panes that the very material used to make transparent lenses is transformed into an opaque diaphragm. In another work, Benassi suspends twenty portraits with a harness from a warehouse crane, all facing inward so that no image is visible—only the wood of the frames and the stretcher bars on the back.

In the artist’s intention to transform photography into a physical object, there are the stratifications — a series of works he has been creating since 2022 by layering photographs and paintings, held together by a system of straps and tensioners. Here, the theme of multiplicity adds to that of cancellation: from the hypervisibility of a world that Benassi has always illuminated with the light of a flash, there is a move toward its negation. Yet, there is no contradiction, because Benassi has always treated photography as a gesture, event, expression of will, proof of existence beyond the image, shifting attention from what is seen to everything that surrounds it, both from the author’s and the observer’s perspective.

The stratifications constitute the core of the exhibition’s journey, highlighting Benassi’s need to contaminate his language with that of sculpture and installation, to the point of making impurity itself (in the dual sense of hybridization and obscenity) one of the main subjects. Hallucinated photographs overlap pseudo-romantic paintings (somewhere between Turner and a Terrence Malick film), plaster casts, fragments of wall, pieces of glass, and much more.

Among the previously unseen works presented in the exhibition, the photographic installation Villa Croce that closes the journey was produced during Jacopo Benassi’s residency at Palazzo Ducale in June. After moving his studio from La Spezia to the Museum, the photographer worked on an original project resulting from a research process that traversed the city and was inspired by it. At the end of the exhibition, the work will be transferred to the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will become part of the permanent collection.

The residency project, conceived and organized by BLU – Breeding and Learning Unit of Genoa, and curated by Laura Lecce, was supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The installation: between reality and fiction

Benassi’s works are expansive, centrifugal, escaping in every direction. The straps that bind the different fragments take the place of frames, which in turn have become part of the works—but without the same geometric sharpness. Having become sculptures, Benassi’s photographs do not simply appear unfinished but precarious. This is the same attribute that could be used to describe the condition of photography today, fearfully balanced between reality and fiction. Likewise, the installation of this exhibition refers to an intermediate stage: where the works rest on the floor before being hung on the wall and thus acquiring a status of superiority. It is the stage before contemplation, when every element is still on the same plane.