The panorama that Clara Benfatti unfolds in one of her main series, Cidades Brancas ('White Cities'), causes in the observer feelings that are, at times, contradictory. If the heavy labor attested by a kind of extensive filigree - formed in the manner of one of those old scenes created by traveling artists in paintings or by photographers at the dawn of this language - is the object of admiration, there is also another movement.
When one takes a closer look at the work, one notices a typical modern metropolis skyline taking shape, more in the sense of the congestion and of a helpless mobility than some utopian and conciliatory metropolis, where the urban signs - much explored in art history by futurists, for example - are indications of a soothing modernity. Thus, the palimpsest to which our gaze is seduced aggregates shapeless data, and why not, monstrous. A long weekend, for example, is enough for the resident of the city of São Paulo to legitimate in body, smoke, traffic lights what Godard, for example, would have exaggerated in the dystopian portrayal of his Alphaville (1965). "It's just that the territory is a 'palimpsest', it writes and draws again, continually"1 alerts Anne Cauquelin in her compulsory A Invenção da Paisagem ('The Invention of Landscape').
The ability of the artist based in São Paulo is precisely in handling these poetic vectors, which are at times conflicting, such as attraction and repulsion, ostentatious display and silent introspection, manual craftsmanship and mass production, the public and the intimate (private and domestic, by extension). Benfatti is an artist ingrained in contemporaneity, and who likes to rip apart previously determined contours and to merge approaches, investigations and languages. Thus her drawing gains ground almost forcibly - while at the same time gently, since its lines and angles are tiny - and migrates to the three-dimensional, as if she were the author of a sculpture forged in physical, real, and concrete space, spreading out to its surroundings without linearity, spreading through the air without corporeity, camouflaging itself in the territory of the unseen.
At the same time, a series of drawings depicting windows of various types, together with the cut out A Silenciosa Fábula dos Objetos('The Silent Fable of Objects'), dimensioning an artist more closely linked to a minimum, essential and quiet dwelling. This act of being smaller in the world connects the artist to more evident aspects of contemporaneity. By drawing almost obsessively the different configurations with which a basic element of a house presents itself to the world, Benfatti seems to weave a compliment to the different personalities, subjectivities and meanings which the consumer world cannot overcome. While simultaneously displaying three-dimensional overlapping layers of tepid materiality - generating spaces installed in a zone between the concrete and the fictional - once again the artist moves towards the concept. "'I must see. This requirement presents itself suddenly, as a whole. However, it is made up of a thousand layers, juxtaposed, which even the most meticulous and well-documented historian cannot capture separately in the detail of its emergence" 2 argues Cauquelin. The universes so full of Benfatti's overlaps therefore say a lot about our need for invention of landscapes.
Mario Gioia, July 2015
1. CAUQUELIN, Anne. A Invenção da Paisagem. Edições 70, Lisboa, 2008, p. 71
2. CAUQUELIN, Anne. Idem, p. 69