Andrea Benini lives and works in Verona, where he was born on 12th June 1956. He attended the Maffei Classical High School in Verona and graduated in Engineering at the Milan Polytechnic, following that with postgraduate academic studies at the Brera in Milan. He is a free-lance professional engineer operating in the civil and building sector. His artistic activity includes a number personal and collective exhibitions in private and public galleries, which have earned him several awards a good measure of recognition and appreciation among both critics and the public at large. In 1993 he was appointed Member of the Boards of Directors of the Verona Society of Fine Arts, with responsibilities for cultural and artistic promotion in the city of Verona and surrounding province. He is Editor-in-Chief of the periodic review Verona – Arte published by the Verona Society of Fine Arts.
“It could be claimed – and there is every reason to believe it is true – that if Andrea Benini had not had a degree in engineering he would never have been able to become a painter with a particular penchant for the fantastic; incredible as it may seem, this is absolutely logical… He is a tenacious constructor, a firm believer in calculation and proportion, who verifies, with astonishing precision, the breadth and distribution of space, the calibration of colour kept implacably under control, and the structural exactness of forms. Yet he is the artist of the visionary and, the symbolic, whose images have nothing to do with the material quality of concrete; he is a seraphic, extravagant poet of silence.These spaces, traversed by fading mists, that trace soft undulating currents, alternate with sectors interlocking like pieces of a puzzle delimited by the lines constructing the images. There are perspectives, hints of beings, landscapes and captivating atmospheres as in some indistinct dream. One is tempted to say that Benini reminds one of the great Lithuanian artist, Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), the forerunner of abstraction, whose peculiar delicacy in selecting shades of colour he seems unwittingly to reproduce. We are talking about his varying greys, changing browns, misty blues, all according to a soft scale of minimal differences, barely highlighted in minimal counterpoint by colours drawn from the warmer range. This is the style of painting, however, in which one does not perceive the coldness proper to certain dream-like surrealistic visions which Benini’s work should not be compared with. His is a thoroughly different approach. It is obvious, I believe, that the painting of levity, frailty and lightness is not the same thing as flippant, frail and light-weight painting. In these images there are no shadows because the sun has become barren. We have to learn from this: it makes sense if the light also disappears in the dream. These images are like desires of some other world, of a dimension that perhaps belongs to the past, to the unfulfilled desires of elapsed time. Or maybe they are but a timorous prayer pending the emergence of something else”.
Renzo Margonari