Text by art critic Antonio Grulli

Jacopo Benassi is one of the artists who has most significantly redefined the boundaries of photography in recent years. We live in an age in which almost everyone takes photographs constantly, achieving, thanks to increasingly advanced and accessible devices, results that are generally more than satisfactory. The real challenge today is to push photography into territories where “ordinary mortals” are unable to venture.

Benassi has moved in two apparently opposite directions. On the one hand, he has given photography a “body” through his installations, making it increasingly physical, sculptural and imposing, while at the same time fragile and precarious. On the other, he has moved in the opposite direction, as though after a brilliant feint, stripping photography of everything: the camera, the film or digital memory, the print on paper or other supports, bringing it back to pure disembodied light, a luminous wave called upon to write in the wind and in the darkness for just a few seconds, leaving no trace behind, while preserving its nature as an imprint, an impression of the world through light.

The installation Immagine di luce is a spotlight used like a gigantic flash. Its activation, lasting only a few moments, is stretched into a fraction of time within which everything and nothing happens. We see what surrounds us only when the light is on; otherwise, everything returns to shadow. Above all, however, we see things differently at the moment the flash is triggered. The spotlight is both sculpture and installation, engaged in a vital relationship with the context that hosts it, while the temporal expansion of the light’s activation amplifies the physical presence of the light itself. A presence so intense that it gives body and three-dimensionality to the objects and surrounding space, almost as though the light were filling the negative volume of the environment and becoming, however briefly, a cast, an imprint capable of recording everything around it and transforming it into sculpture and plastic matter.

This photographic trap has a magical effect on the people who enter its field of action. The illuminated bodies become protagonists. Or perhaps I should say they become both prey and protagonists. Being under the spotlight is a condition in which discomfort almost always outweighs pleasure, but being a protagonist means entering a story and often becoming its driving force. The audience becomes part of the installation itself, adding a performative dimension to the work. It is no coincidence that Jacopo conceived a performance in dialogue with this luminous sculpture, entitled Light is life!. The duration of the light becomes the rhythm and boundary of the performance, dictating and directing the action. Light becomes an injection of energy that generates the story and gives life.

The combination of the two works is tied to the specific place where the spotlight is installed. The Fontana del Foo, or Fontana del Faggio, has always been an important place for the local community and, in the past, was the focal point around which everyday life revolved. A spring rises from the ground, bringing life and inevitably making this place sacred — that is, set apart precisely because it is vital. And the reference to a beech tree — sub tegmine fagi, bringing classical memories to mind — heightens this impression. People would gather around springs and beneath the broad branches of trees to rest, converse, and tell stories about their own lives and those of others. In the past, during summer evenings, this space hosted theatre companies, transforming itself into a natural open-air theatre. Immagine di luce partly restores this place as a centre of gravity for the community, becoming a new fire around which people can gather and give life to new stories.