IL PAESAGGIO BENEDETTO (Blessed Landscapes by Benedetto)

By David L. Shirey

It is said that some people enter a room, and, seeing others, exclaim: "Here I am!" Others say: "There you are!" Anthony Benedetto's paintings do both. They vividly bespeak of a compelling self-confidence and a persuasive authority that assert their own powerful presence and at the same time forcefully engage the presence of the viewers. They possess the what and the how to cause their world and ours to intersect.

The force, power and presence in his art do not aggress our vision but quietly and seductively effect a serenely enchanting interaction with both our face's eye and our mind's eye. Mr. Benedetto's views of Rome, Venice, Florence and other places gently seek engagement with our sight and our thought.

These vedute, as they are known in Italian, are as much a tribute to thought that elicits notions of placid adventure as they are objects of immediate visual pleasure. They are personal inventions that can summon up memories of a time and place and shepherd us though a realm of reverie. Although the works are small in dimension, they are still large enough to make room for our feelings and emotions.

These artistic achievements are not feasible if the artist is an unimaginative practitioner of paint whose primary objective is the simulation of descriptive facts. It is true that Mr. Benedetto's views are of recognizable landmarks. More importantly, however, they are also embodiments of an individual sensibility that embraces the essence of an experience. The artist stamps his own temperament on the subject matter and the result is a felicitous co-operation between himself and the world.

To achieve this result, the painter does not define so much as he evokes. With his earthbound palette of greens, sensual ochres and russets, his pale gray and muffled mauves, configured in streaming ribbons of fluid color, pointillist dots, playful scumbles and accented stipples, he shapes an encompassing impression and composes a lyrical mood--a visual tone poem.

In his work we become participants in his pictorial ambience, an ambience that has been fashioned by the forces of nature and man. Inimical to the unpleasant and objectionable, the watercolors and oils beckon us directly to friendly surroundings that welcome us to their aura. With Mr. Benedetto as our muse and cicerone, we can indulge our pleasures of place and not be burdened by adversities of any kind.

Having lived in Rome and in other parts of Italy many years, I cherish Mr. Benedetto's ability to have accomplished something of particular importance to me. With the magnificent Eternal City without the hubbub and uproar of its eternal, deafening traffic and chiming bells. He has forged a noiseless Rome, one that, I believe, is sometimes better seen than heard.

Wherever Mr. Benedetto accompanies us in Italy--Rome, Florence, Venice, Reggio Calabria, the Chianti countryside, Taromina--he apparently thinks that more than three make a crowd. With the exception of a few scenes where people are mere hints rather than intrusive entities, there are in our view the artist, his subject of choice and we, his guests. We notice in the exuberantly rococo Scalinata of Rome's Spanish Steps that people gather near the neighboring piazza. But they are so diminished in size, and we, by comparison, are afforded a freedom of movement through a dominant, unhampered bird's-eye view. In the view of the San Domenico Hotel, a former Sicilian monastery, a few persons, their backs turned to us, do not interrupt nor infringe on our companionship with the place.

There is also a companionable report with the landscapes and cityscapes. We are at one with them in a nexus between nature and man. Not one to present us with a forbidding perception, the artist projects a vision of one seamless whole. In fact, he so stresses unity of purpose that details, while playing their appropriate roles, are subservient to the general atmospheric impression. Mr. Benedetto, with seemingly effortless gesture and gossamer touch, mixes and melds disparate elements into a binding coalescence of expression.

Some might sense a suggestion of sobering isolation in these paintings. However, for me, they give rise to a sense of idyllic solitude, something different. In involving themselves with that which is particular to the Meleto Castle, the precipitous Calabrian crags and the luxuriant Chianti hillsides, observers find in the pastoral panoramas enough pictorial incident to occupy their attention and dispel loneliness. People never feel less alone than when they are by themselves in these landscapes, much as Italians who believe the proverb that we are never alone in paradise.

Artists have for some time been spellbound by the landscape as Arcadia, Elysian fields whose natural glory is marred only by the presence of death. Mr. Benedetto appears to have banned the evanescent from his radiant picture of the endless summer. The burgeoning olive graves, the plush poplars and the sturdy cypresses, the luminous skies all give the lie to decay and perishability. Clouds do not eclipse, flora does not wither, waters do not foil. He reassures us that the verdant greens and lambent light are perdurable and that the fecundity of nature is not fugitive.

The painter uses his watercolor technique with such nimbleness that rather than calling attention to its agility, his skill dexterously conceals it. Anyone who has manipulated watercolor knows that it is the most fickle of media, a chromatic flux that recalcitrantly follows its own obstinate mind. Under Mr. Benedetto's commanding hand, it is marshaled to do what he wills, whether it is meant to whisper or proclaim, to conquer or to acquiesce. His masterly twist-of-the-wrist, conducted with a quickening stroke of painterly élan, conveys the sense of the spontaneous and the intuitive. It does not belabor but it points the way.

Mr. Benedetto is what the French term a monstre sacre, a sacred monster who has more talent than anyone this side of the galaxy should be allowed. Indeed, he has a saintly first name and his surname in Italian means blessed. This is the stuff out of which hagiographies are written. We all know that in the annals of modern music his artistry soars on melismatic pinnacles. Both his music and his painting share a humanity that gives form to his feelings and spirit. If Mr. Benedetto surrendered the music of his voice, he would still have the music of his palette. One wonders if his painting has, in turn, sent signals to his music.

The artist paints the same scenes many times but each scene is different. He makes a shadow in one piece transfigure into a substance in another. He varies times of day, intensities of light and chromatic and compositional strategies. What has an andante calm here can have an allegro thrust there. What might be more physically sensual in one landscape can be metaphysically ethereal in another. Differences enhance the resemblances and resemblances challenge the differences.

Eugene O'Neill wrote: "Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace." There is still enough of the child in Mr. Benedetto to believe in fairy tales and magic doors and he persuades us to believe in them too. His kingdom enables us to exult in the calm of self.

In both music and painting, English and Italian, Bennett and Benedetto mean the same thing--artist.

David L. Shirey, former art critic for Newsweek and the New York Times, is Chairman of the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts (New York City), and writes for numerous publications. He will soon receive in Italy a distinguished recognition that awards him for his contributions to European, especially Italian, culture and to education in the arts through his writing and teaching.