Benni Bosetto
"Il codice delle mura bagnate #2"

Art historian and critic Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, in his essay Pissing Figure 1280-2014, has highlighted how the history of European art reveals an evolutionary progression of ideas concerning the human body and the diverse meanings (magical, medical, symbolic, and religious) attributed to its fluids. <<Procession of urinating children set about inundating paintings and sculptures in villas and public squares. Pissing boys in reinassance fountains alternated with women spilling water from their nipples, a variant on the traditional approach, in which water streamed from the human mouth.>> 2
Bosetto appropriates this legacy, formally liquidifying even the gesture of drawing. Amidst the grotesques of wallpaper, where details of naked bodies combine to create new patterns, the drawing Pissing Kid emerges. A figure urinating, it maintains an indelible ambiguity between the comic and the tragic, the corporeal and the spiritual, indecency and innocence, while subtly alluding to eroticism.

As if streaming from the walls, crystalline water droplets dot and traverse the room. In one corner, a fountain gushes, overflowing from the floor, presenting almost a living, vegetal presence (Tutte le monete si asciugano bruciando la fontana). On a daybed lie ceramic tubes (Frammenti liquidi di orecchie e ossa bagnate a riposo) that, while recalling the structural functionality of the object, appear entirely organic. They suggest movement, flow, and convey fluids and energies.

Finally, a wall opens (This room was a dream for a room), revealing a new space. As if facing a window, we observe a room, from whose walls flow dark liquids, in which pipes/veins pulsate on the floor. A house, an organism. This dreamlike scene fulfills the fusion of the body in space. And of space in the body.

Through an anthology of her practices (installation, drawing, sculpture), in Il codice delle mura bagnate #2, Benni Bosetto celebrates the human body in its liquidity. Quoting Virginia Wolf, there are tides in the body. We float and flow through time and space. 3

 

 

 

1 Annalisa Sacchi, We are all bodies of water, in Short Theatre, 30 agosto 2022, https://www.shorttheatre.org/mag/we-are-all-bodies-of-water/
2 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Pissing Figure 1280-2014, 2016, ed. David Zwirner Books, p. 16
3 Astrida Neinanis, Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water

Benni Bosetto (Merate, IT, 1987) lives and works in Milan. She studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Benni Bosetto produces wall paintings and drawings, performances, sculptures and installations in which the body is deconstructed and reimagined.
Throughout her practice, the artist maintains a sensual and therapeutic approach, almost holistic, that envelopes viewers in an intimate trance-state, where time feels suspended. Objectivity and monolithic explanations are abandoned in favour of a fragmented conception of reality, the space of possibility.
Recent shows include: Mai36, Zurich; MAXXI L’Aquila, Galleria Francesca Minini, Milan; Campoli Presti, Paris; Mambo, performance at Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna; ADA, Rome; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene; Almanac, Turin; Kunstraum, London; Villa Medici, Rome; Performance presso OGR, Turin; Fondazione Baruchello, Rome.

In the early eighties, with the founding of Studio PER, Ermanno Previdi embarked upon his own journey as an independent architect and designer. Operating until the mid-2000s, Studio PER then evolved into its current structure, now named pconp. For over thirty years, pconp has been working on many different projects for clients including commercial and industrial companies, fashion brands and real estate corporates, among others – always embracing an idea of modernity that still believes that it is possible to reshape the society in which we live, “dal cucchiaio alla città” (from the spoon to the city) as Ernesto Nathan Rogers once said.