Via Emilia is my memory

“I arrived at Brera just as the masters like Purificato and Messina were being surpassed.”

Just don’t pay attention to it. And after a few minutes even the deafening noise of the Via Emilia (trucks, Ape vans, latest-generation compact cars, old two-wheelers) ends up becoming a pleasant background hum, like water flowing between the blades of a mill. After all, the studio where Davide Benati has taken refuge since last summer—before being the bakery of Masone, a few houses at the gates of Reggio Emilia—used to be the family mill: now, on the ground floor, Benati has transferred his entire world of fantasies, protected from that uninterrupted river of cars and trucks only by the glass panes of the large windows. While upstairs his elderly mother still lives (apparently far from everything now), together with two caregivers and a ninety-year-old cousin.

A large hall, a small study, a storage room: this is Benati’s “loft with a soul” (as he likes to call it). The brick floor partly covered with plastic sheets; the tables piled high with those papers on which to paint “so many worlds” dotted with calla lilies, frangipani, lotus flowers (“I bought the first sheets in Nepal at the end of the seventies, I still remember the look on the customs officer’s face, a huge Sikh, when I unpacked them… for him it was more logical to find hashish”). The basins with colors and brushes (“You need a very quick hand because this paper absorbs watercolor immediately”). Davide’s universe, however, is made of art but also of everyday life (mail, buying paints and canvases, divided equally between Reggio, Modena, Bologna, with an occasional diversion to Milan). Providing the soundtrack are the voices of “his” past (along with the honking on the Via Emilia): “I left from here when I was only 18, thanks to an uncle, a doctor, who vouched for me with my father. And my father always believed in me. I owe this journey to him: on the bookcases at home, even though he was only a baker, I found Vittorini’s Americana and Saroyan’s stories.” In some way he says, “he paved the way for me” toward literature but also toward art. And as irrefutable proof he shows, pulling it out of a simple wooden bookcase full of memories, the catalog of the Van Gogh exhibition at Palazzo Reale in the very distant 1952. “My father bought it; I still reread it today.” Among these fragments of family life there is often room for regret: “He didn’t live long enough to see my works exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1981. He got sick and died that same summer. Until the end he told me, you’ll see, I’ll come to Venice… even if I have to come on foot.”

Benati (one of the leading artists at the Marlborough Gallery) declares he owes much to the lesson of the great Bacon: “I still have in my head the article Dino Buzzati wrote in the Corriere, where he compared him to a reverse Dorian Gray.” And Milan: “I arrived when ’68 was happening. I think my emotion was very similar to that of a young person today discovering Berlin. As I arrived, the world, including the art world, was changing, and the ancient masters of the Academy like Purificato, Messina or Cantatore suddenly became outdated. While the desire to go further, seeking new perspectives, was growing.” And that pilot still leaning against the (peeling) studio walls, besides being Benati’s admission piece for the Academy, is nothing but the symbol of what the new art wanted to be. Milan was therefore, for the boy from Masone, literally Another World (“At first I lived in a sublet in Felicita Frai’s studio in Via Montebello”). Later replaced by the East: first Nepal, then China and Japan (the Japan of Hiroshige and Hokusai but also that of Kurosawa and The Burmese Harp). An East never conventional, rather ritual, fascinating, surprising, like the one described by Goffredo Parise in Beauty is Frigid.

On the Via Emilia the traffic never rests (“This summer, I never slept. Then I got used to it”). The noise of memory is continuous but still does not “wound,” also because Benati, with his wife Margherita, lives further inside (three hundred meters as the crow flies from that strip of asphalt) “where really everything seems to have almost stopped.” The world of Masone appears unchanged compared to that of his parents (his mother was an embroiderer). Reinforcing this is his old friend Ulderico who enters, as he does every day (or almost), to greet him: “The door is always open. Just like when my father was here” (Ulderico discreetly greets, smiles, promises “I’ll come back” and leaves).

Sitting on his elegant fifties sofa, Benati (white beard, dressed entirely in blue, scarf included) continues to tie together the threads of his memory and his inspiration. From his experience as a graphic artist for newspapers (“They were commentary cartoons for Il Lavoro, with an eye on Hugo Pratt and Moebius”) to his enthusiasm for Arte Povera and above all for “that ability to use matter”; from the masters (Hiroshige and Hopper, Turner and Gastone Novelli, Licini and Chardin, Pontormo and Vermeer) to his friends (such as Mario Perazzi, “one of the important people for my work and my life”). And again: the bond with Antonio Tabucchi (“I had read Indian Nocturne, I looked for him and we became friends. I was struck by that air he had of an English officer”) and his passion for young people (“I feel regret that they are denied a first opportunity”). Young artists included: “I like Luca Pignatelli, Marco Petrus, Vanessa Beecroft.” It is precisely Beecroft (“sometimes even too highly valued”) who introduces the theme of the art market and its stars: “Hirst and Koons are the symbol of art turning into fashion, or rather of fashion mechanisms taking over and distorting those of art. The problem is that, as in the case of Hirst’s skull exhibited at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where such figures pass, no grass grows anymore—in the sense that no exhibition or event can ever again arouse the same interest.”

The cold winter light continues to enter through the windows with yellow frames, naturally made by an old friend who “was so slow that for now I’ve only managed to get three of them.” But there is no hurry also because this year Benati has decided “to rest” to be ready to dive into the fantastic universe of his works (Tenebrocuore, Lotus solus, Cantico, Azzorre, Grande Marittimo). Playing again with memory. On what he calls his “table of life,” which has followed him through all his wanderings (“because it can be dismantled; a friend of mine, an architect, made it”), are small traces precisely of that past: CDs by Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and Amalia Rodrigues, snapshots taken during his courses (“The last lesson I gave by comparing Bacon’s studio with Morandi’s”); an Olivetti Lettera 32; highlighters; travel notebooks toward that East where (he says) “I move like a pilgrim through the colors of the markets among sacks and spices. I buy saffron, lapis lazuli and shellac, then incense, a tin suitcase and a pashmina.”

In the end comes the moment to move the precious papers (“They must be glued to the canvas with a light glue so as not to saturate the weave too much”) to make room for Parmigiano, culatello and a glass of wine (this time it is a good local red “but we could also have drunk a French Chablis to try something new”). A snack that again takes Davide back in time: to when, as a child (his brother Daniele, four years younger, translated Joyce, taught in the United States, in Ireland and today in Budapest), he accompanied his father to deliver bread to the psychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro, where Antonio Ligabue, the painter of “Padanian madness,” was also hospitalized. Once it was a city (today it is only the Criminal Asylum) a step away from Masone: “That place scared me. I always remember the man who came to pick up the baskets of bread; he was deaf-mute and wore around his waist a champion boxer’s belt. Everything frightened me, but at the same time fascinated me.” Guccini sings in his Piccola città: “Imagination ran toward the prairie, between the Via Emilia and the West.” But imagination, we know, loves to play tricks: and so, this time, it seems to want to take us far from this strip of asphalt full of family memories: under the enormous tree where the crazy uncle of Amarcord perched.

“Hirst and Koons are art that becomes fashion: where they pass, no grass grows anymore"