“Premature 107” by Giovanni De Benedetto
Review by Claudio Komarek
"If fish didn't exist, would you be able to imagine them?" the Bluvertigo told us in a famous song in vogue in the 1990s within the track Altre Forme di Vita and this is a deeper issue of the post-punk new-wave musical context and concerns the link between thought, language and reality.
Within this investigation travels his journey the talented genuine artist Giovanni De Benedetto, one who is very attentive, in addition to appearance, to the substance of the creative path. And it is precisely in the creative path that the quality of this enthralling, pulsating, mysterious work, "PREMATURE 107," is highlighted; it arises from a semiconscious process of research on forms, a path that in part touches the suggestion of Rorschach's stains, and in another part sinks into the analysis that Jung used to make regarding archetypes and the world of the collective unconscious. There are immanent forms that show themselves to us in a semi-spontaneous way, forms that we can find because they already exist in our minds, and when we come into contact with them, we experience a unique vibration, as in entering a dark world through a fissure, a world where we feel without seeing, where we move without actually moving.
Archetypes then, fantastic creatures, aliens, golems, have always been a vivid sign of how comfortably universal the human imagination is, and the artist gives substance to this universal story of archetypal representation. A creative journey, we said, an intense one, that of the creation of Premature 107, almost as if the creature wanted to come into the world in a kind of cyber-biological birth, through the transition from different media, from paper to digital, from the second to the third dimension, from the still image to the animated one. The final result is a child. Very often we call children "creatures," and this creature is the child of man's collective imagination over time, the union of the zoomorphic dreams of successive generations, a self-conceived digital biological magma that reminds us of our molecular nature and reminds us that our thought are also blood and electricity at 70 millivolts.
Gustavus Rol said that everything is matter, but a matter which is different from what the materialists used to tell us, a matter which transcends the dimension of space-time as the human mind conceives it, a matter which transforms and mutates into an eternal flux in which everything is connected, The artist more than anyone else has the tools to peek into this "divine" mechanism and like a stealthy transgressor he steals details from the realm of the unconscious to show them to us.
"Premature 107" is the little naked meal hiding inside us, pulsing like those 300 grams of flesh pumping blood inside us 86400 seconds a day vitalizing our dreams, our thoughts, our excitements, our relationships, our creative gestures, our uninterrupted degeneration.
Take the most beautiful woman in your city, turn her inside out by putting her inside out and vice versa, she will look like a pulsing mass of flesh and blood.
There is no deeper poetry than the tale of our guts, no truer reality than the flow of our blood, the monsters we create are we, "there is everything we can still imagine." Let this PREMATURE revelation be a mirror to reflect you in the form of art, as De Benedetto says.