Photography: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio

Text: Margherita Pincioni / margherita_pincioni

Enter the world of Jacopo Benassi, in the first solo show at the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato. The museum celebrates twenty-five  years of photography with the show exhibiting until January 31, 2021.

With the Vuoto exhibition, curated by Elena Magini, the Prato museum offers a glimpse into the powerful and personal work of the photographer. The title of the exhibition recalls the specific sensation of the author with respect to his production, a desire to get naked, pulling everything out of himself, in a path of public self-exposure: the photographer gives himself entirely to the viewer, handing over his studio, his tools, the creative panorama that accompanies him in his work, the set of shots that give life to a twenty-year investigation on the themes of identity, of the night, of the work.

 “With the Jacopo Benassi exhibition - underlines the Director of the Pecci Center, Cristiana Perrella - the museum continues its investigation of the body, identity and gender through the photographic medium, starting with the exhibitions Nomadic Subject and Ren Hang. Nudes, projects that, not surprisingly, have had a great success with the public and the press. In fact, I believe that these issues, with all their complexities and contradictions, are today at the center of a revolutionary debate and that art has a recognized role in this debate."

From the artist's studio partially recreated within the exhibition in the rooms of the Pecci Center, the exhibition is showing some of the author's most significant series and works, and also spills out into the city spaces, where the exhibition is announced by a site-specific billboard project.

Jacopo Benassi trained within the La Spezia underground culture, over time developing a particular style made up of a lack of depth of field and flash; a raw, true photograph, despite the total lack of real light. The subjects are the most disparate, from humanity that inhabits underground and international musical culture (starting from the experience of the Btomic club, managed by the same photographer with some friends) to portraits of models, actresses, artists, stylists published in the most important Italian magazines, up to the investigation of the body, A special place is occupied by the self-portrait, often linked to his performative path: the experimentation on the performance, his own or that of others, is constantly linked to the music and is always mediated by the photographic images, subject and object of his research.