Benedetta Giampaoli

Her research is based on the need to retrace personal suggestions through their translation into painting: the aim is to approach a fluid figuration, free from any specific temporal definition, in the belief that images need to arrive in painting in order to come to rest, to be suspended from the flow of time. Everyday experience leaves traces, memories, but also scars, which are reworked and made visible in a new guise on the painted surface. She considers her paintings as pieces of a puzzle-enigma or parts of a labyrinth: often the image is not resolved within the limits of the painted surface but needs to continue onto the next canvas to be better understood.

The sinister figures that inhabit the paintings openly show their anxieties: they are confined within inner labyrinths and often find themselves at a crossroads, a choice that precedes the leap into the unknown. A hostile, uncanny habitat that represents a familiar limbo, an intermediate zone between the everyday and the marvellous, a kind of place of shadow where the unconscious takes control of our deepest thoughts. By retracing their own chaos, the subjects find the resources to purify themselves and to find their way out of their inner labyrinth.

Elements such as light, fire or fireflies have become a key to reading her work, a sort of will-o’-the-wisp guiding the figures, wrapped in nocturnal and twilight skies.