Riccardo Benvenuti - Untitled

We are faced with an almost full-length female figure. The woman is facing left and looking thoughtfully downward. She rests her hands on her hips in a position that suggests she is free from thoughts. On her robe, she wears the astrological sign of Scorpio, and the actual animal is also depicted beneath the symbol.

The style of the work, in this case, is naturally influenced by the technique used to create it. We are dealing with a lithography, a type of graphic art. The word itself derives from the Greek and means "writing on stone." Indeed, the technique is based on the mutual repulsion of fatty and mineral materials. After initially preparing a very thick stone slab, the artist begins to create his drawing with a greasy pencil. When the ink is applied to the stone, it adheres only to the drawing itself. Following previously marked lines on the stone, the sheet of paper is placed on the slab and the whole is pressed, thus transferring and imprinting the design onto the paper. Each color requires a separate plate. Thanks to the unique nature of the technique, the graphic before us almost resembles a pencil drawing, precisely because of the porosity of the stone, which, unlike other graphic techniques, results in a less incisive line.

Riccardo Benvenuti is an artist particularly recognizable for his pictorial poetics, which is linked to a feminine universe and the zodiac signs, where from time to time we find people lost in their thoughts, as if suspended in nothingness, where their hair seems scattered as if these figures were in space free from the force of gravity.

Riccardo Benvenuti was born in Lucca in 1939 and began his artistic career early. He attended art school and later returned there as a teacher of painting, art history, and figurines. It was in the 1970s that his art began to gain national and international recognition. In 1974, for the Puccini anniversary, he held an exhibition at Lincoln Center in New York, Chicago, and Madrid. In the years that followed, he took on various high-profile commissions, collaborating with Dalí, creating posters for sporting events, overseeing the creation of liturgical paintings, and receiving a monograph with a preface by Paolo Levi. In 2004, he was considered the official representative of Puccini's work and became the curator of the "Butterfly" exhibition organized for the centenary of Madama Butterfly. Benvenuti, a multifaceted artist, has lived in various places, including New York, Paris, Miami, and Los Angeles, but it seems he has returned to Lucca, his hometown. What is most remembered about his work are the women he portrayed: beautiful, enigmatic, elegant, and seductive, rendered splendid by his skillful use of light and shadow, creating an almost magical atmosphere. He passed away in 2018.

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