L’Ultimo Invitato (The Last Guest)
a bipersonal exhibition by Luca Grimaldi and Giulio Bensasson
Curated by Giulia Tornesello
May – September 2024
L’Ultimo Invitato (The Last Guest), a two-person exhibition that brings together the paintings of Luca Grimaldi (Rome, 1985) with the sculptures and watercolours of Giulio Bensasson (Rome, 1990) is a cross-section of a timeless society, a pompous celebration of nothingness.
We are immersed in an Arcadia of the vanquished where nature is flaunted and faith is placed elsewhere, where the disillusioned contemporary erects votive altars to what remains and celebrates as best he can.
In the new works on display in the exhibition, a deliberately excessive and grotesque decorativism frames an icon, sacralising it. The everyday from which we arbitrarily or unconsciously avert our gaze is placed at the centre of the work, acquiring new meaning and forcing the viewer to confront it.
In Luca Grimaldi‘s oil paintings, still life is overturned: the background of the canvas is tessellated with dense gradients in a rationalisation of the brushwork surrounding the main subject, which is instead almost emptied by the painting. Iconic and central, the symbol of what crosses our eye every day without ever really hitting it takes on importance; the monumentally central position of the subject forces us to give it importance and at the same time the missed brushstrokes give it its real value. The paintings in the exhibition take on the riotous revolutionary character of the French post-impressionists, they assume the same brazenness as Gauguin‘s Ham in the presence of critics and academies, they force questioning.
Grimaldi’s research is articulated in the manner of Wayne Thiebaud: his paintings – especially those in which the background becomes looming leaden – are both celebration and condemnation of consumerism with a rhetoric articulated on the Italian-style American Dream, a far cry from New York Pop. His technique remains – as with Thiebaud – firmly linked to the tradition of the great masters of classical painting.
The five new works on display develop from the SuperVero project, presented by the artist and gallery 1/9unosunove last year.
Giulio Bensasson‘s sculptural works first volumise Augustan grotesque decorations to empty Renaissance ones later, characterising the lack of what was there or what was expected to be there. A fake opulence that acts as a sanctuary to dust, to what remains when there is nothing left.Death takes centre stage amidst the glitz of excess and the consumerism of worldliness, and the sculptures become a depiction of Trimalchio’s Supper (Petronius, Satyricon, I A.D.) at the exact moment when, amidst the lavish banquets and overflowing trays, the host – the emblem of the enriched servant – declaims the ‘Tale of the Witches’ forcing the diners to think about death. In form, Bensasson‘s sculptures appear as classical architectural motifs ordered according to the clean lines of the contemporary, following the operative criteria of Giovanni Da Udine and Giulio Romano in the composition of the Loggias of Villa Madama on Monte Mario.
Similarly, the works on paper consolidate the artist’s research and present themselves as a further evolution of the previous works in the series Temo che mi sfugga qualcosa (started in 2017), shrouds of corpses of cut flowers; in these new works, the trace of death and decomposition harmonises in grotesque motifs generating new beauty and accepting the invitation of Come Funghi (2017-22; work winner of the Talent Prize 2023), a wish to transform decay into enchantment.
Giulia Tornesello