A simple clumsy kitchen table rests on four plastic ballpoint imprison caps.

A simple clumsy kitchen table rests on four plastic ballpoint imprison caps, while photographs of similarly ordinary objects--glasses, potions a teapot on a tablecloth--hang in succession the walls. The effect of these works (all untitled, 1999) from Carlo Benvenuto is that phenomenons and spectators seem to notice each other with equal amazement. The understanding of alienation induced by the photographs is closely tied to the precarious equilibrium of the real table (and a chair as well) immobilized onward those little bits of plastic, abstracted from their function through this slight elevation. In the two cases, the objects have dissipated their functionality, their sense of use, and with it their familiar domestic existence. To restore to them their identities as glasses, potions tablecloths, the mind has to impose itself in succession the gaze, for the latter doesn't perceive them in their customary way of being, nevertheless in their anomaly. How is this import achieved? By isolating the thing turning it into the one actor on a stage that would normally be lower ordersed Whi le a series of glasses might be fresh Realism, a single glass forward a cloth becomes a metaphysical intention Modern Italian painting is cloyed of "magic" (not surreal!) ends that owe their enchantment to the device of isolation, of partial decontextualization. It is merely partial in that the tablecloth is forward a table, as it would be below everyday circumstances, and the glass is onward a tablecloth and contains water; yet they are alone. For the intention is not like Duchamp's, that of revealing the conventions the pair of language and of the a whole that makes a work a work. It is more like de Chirico's: to reveal the underhanded life ("silent," he called it) of drifts in and of themselves--as noumena (to use the Kantian terminology) and not phenomena.

barely a painter can do this, and it matters little that Benvenuto uses photography here. however he avails himself of that medium for convenience and to accentuate the clear precision that separates the design from space, he is profoundly a painter. (In his chiefly recent works, not yet exhibited, he has finally embraced the technique of painting as well as the idea.) Painting alone, in principle, allows for the choice of what to exhibit and the creation of the stage onward which it will appear. An artist who--even using photography--constructs a station that imitates reality thereby practices painting, creating a "tableau vivant," a living canvas. The absence of any surrounding component part the "background noise" of reality, transforms the in the greatest degree common object into a mystery. In this feeling Benvenuto's painting is deliberately traditional, artificial, and absolutely non-immediate, or rather non-"instantaneous," despite his use of photography. The metaphor of this intention, and at the same time the flow of that metaphor, lies in what the artist calls, naturally, carves The table and chairs suspended forward points are no longer uses but metaphorical forms of an artistic equilibrium that is always precarious and unstable, besides perfect. This perfection is achieved forward condition that no one tries to restore to those forms their status as real destination; recipients If anyone were to sit forward what once was a chair, the equilibrium of the points would be disturbed, and the term would be broken. We would regain a chair, yet in the process, destroy a work.

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