Corpi sul palco

Jacopo Benassi was born in La Spezia, Italy (1970), where he lives and works.

The artist begins to move in the world of photography in the 1980s, in particular through environments linked to underground music. Over the years his research became wider and began to include portraits and self-portraits, performances, painting, nature and the world of fashion, while maintaining, however, as a sort of constant, a very intimate and introspective way of taking pictures. Jacopo has participated in various exhibitions and many events in institutions such as the Centro Pecci in Prato, Tate in London and the Palais De Tokyo in Paris. He has produced numerous publications including books and fanzines, among the others FAGS edited by nero, The Belt by Skira, Bologna Portraits by Damiani, The Eyes Can See What The Mouth Can Not Say by Peperoni books, Gli aspetti irrilevanti by Mondadori. He has collaborated with directors and writers such as Paolo Sorrentino, Daniele Cipri, Asia Argento and Maurizio Maggiani and has followed and created various advertising campaigns in the fashion sector. Jacopo has also followed the cultural program of Btomic, a famous club in La Spezia, for which he has created self- produced editorial projects related to the alternative music scene proposed by the venue. Despite the innumerable experiences he managed to be in contact with, Jacopo has managed to transversally crossing different fields and moving between heterogeneous disciplines, the way in which he shoots remains very faithful to the approach with which he began: the depth of field is canceled by the light of the flash. Benassi has made this characteristic of rapid and instinctive photography of underground cultures which often requires flash and short exposure times to portray clandestine and lightless situations his signature style, thus giving his research a raw character and powerful. With Jacopo Benassi, photography becomes sculpture, not only because the flash cuts out the silhouettes of his subjects with precision, but because the shot itself enters into dialogue with the artist’s frames, assembled by the artist himself, which thus make each work unique and unrepeatable. Jacopo never ceases to suggest that the will to create would not exist without the will to destroy: frames burned or made with accepted wood and cut glass, a tribute to imperfection that allows us to measure the complexity and roughness of things. Assemblies of photographic, material and pictorial elements find their stability thanks to the grip of an industrial anchor belt. With them Jacopo speaks to us with a disarming courage of fragility and the constant search for balance.

Recent solo shows include: AUTORITRATTO CRIMINALE, GAM Turin (2024), Vuoto, Franciscaines Museum, Festival of Photography, Deauville (2023), Serenata Agitata, Una Boccata d’Arte, Gardone Riviera (2023), MATRICE, Fondazione Carispezia, La Spezia (2022), PAST, Francesca Minini, Milan (2021), VUOTO, Centro Pecci, Prato (2020), CRACK, CAMERA Turin (2019), Bologna Portraits, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna (2019).

Flavio Favelli was born in Florence, Italy (1967),and he lives and works in Bologna, Italy.

In 1993 he graduated at the University of Bologna with a degree in Oriental Studies, only afterwards beginning his career as an artist.
Flavio Favelli creates works using old objects of décor or everyday use, such as lighting fixtures, picture frames, Fanta or Coca Cola bottles, trinkets that evoke the bourgeois aesthetic of the family environments he grew up in, or the Eastern cultures he studied at university. His works are collages, sculptures or installations in which these recycled materials are brought together, giving life to layers of meaning that isolate the object from its mere material reality, elevating it to an artistic dimension. This transition does not occur through the distortion of the object itself but rather through an amplification of its functional features, of its value as an object of use, as an object of décor, as an icon of the everyday life of the past, unwittingly existing in the present. The marked autobiographical component in these works (which also lies behind the artist’s rare performances), functions as a common filter for interpreting the various lines of inquiry that Flavio Favelli develops in all of his works, and, through a reflection on memory and the development of a “poetics of the object” centered around the exotic-everyday dichotomy, he threads together his own personal story with broader social history and political ideas.

Flavio Favelli’s works a marked sense of Italianness. In his art he develops and reworks the contradictions that came about with the rise of conceptual art (and pop-art) internationally, placing these theoretical frameworks inside the forms and achievements of the Italian conceptual tradition. The result are works with a hybrid soul, which make it difficult to know where to place him on the Italian art scene, and at the same time emphasizing the strong personal element that underlies the language used in each individual work.

His works have been exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); GAM, Turin (2022); Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Il bello inverso, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2019); Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan (2017); UNIVERS, A METAPHYSIC STORE, Venice (2017); Art Basel Hong Kong – the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2015, 2012, 2010); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2012), MACRO, Rome (2012; 2011); RISO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palermo (2011), American Academy in Rome (2011, 2010); Tate Modern, London (2010), MCA, Chicago (2009), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008; 2007, 2002); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2008), Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2008), Benaki Museum, Athens (2008), La Maison Rouge (2007), MAMBO, Bologna (2007), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, (2007); Creative Art Center, Beijing (2006); Musèe d’Art Moderne de Saint- Etienne, Saint- Etienne (2005), Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles (2004), Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano (2003).
In 2012 the artist represented Italy at the 11th Biennale de La Habana and he has twice taken part – in 2003 and in 2013 – in the Venice Biennale. Flavio Favelli was chosen for the residence at the Italian Cultural Institute of Istanbul and in 2014 he had a solo show in the historic complex of the Galata Rum Okulu school.