During the last 12 years, Giovanni De Benedetto developed the Augmented Klecksography Paintings (AKPs), with a process involving action painting, photography, and digital post-production.
PREMATURE is a fine art photography project that includes all the AKP artworks, pushing the boundaries of the creative possibility of klecksography, where the aesthetic power of the artist’s original paintings is enhanced through the mean of photography.
Klecksography is the technique of making images starting from inkblots, pioneered by Justinus Kerner since the second half of the 19th century and soon ever used by the famous psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach.
The union between klecksography and photography creates an outcome that immortalizes the freshness of each painting and enhances its details, making the photography of the artwork the final piece that stands on its own.
The genesis of a PREMATURE artwork resides in the silent dialogue established between the artist and the paint which, after being thrown onto black cardboard and folded in two, it is shaped under the artist’s fingers, following the path of the matter to the point it can reveal itself before him.
The object of this revelation is the form that constitutes the work of art, depicting creatures never thought, nor designed, figures of anthropomorphic beings coming from the future of the unconscious and loaded with such an inherent visual power that they take on a life of their own in front a viewer’s sight.
The visual power is mainly given by the formal harmony of symmetry and by the textures which the artwork is made of. The augmented feature is given thanks to photography and digital post- production for two main reasons:
1. Each artwork is photographed when the paint is still wet, making the painting eternally fresh and highlighting the details of the textures. In this context, the shooting of the artwork is unavoidable to create the piece.
2. Starting from 2020, each PREMATURE artwork is constituted by dozens of macro shots of the original painting (A4 size) assembled, all together to keep the photo quality high as possible to be printed in wide format.
The complexity of the forms is the structural factor that mainly differentiates the PREMATURE project from the Rorschach tests, but it is also the different role given to the painting and the photo-print within the creative context that constitutes a crucial aspect to take into consideration.
Indeed, the PREMATURE project could be related to the photo-secession movement because of the aim of narrowing the distance between photography and painting.
Whereas the photo-secessionists used the camera and the post-chemical development as a means to emulate the aesthetic of a painting, each PREMATURE art work has an original painting as the sole subject.
Moreover, the shooting of a painting has usually the only purpose of documenting it within a context, as during an exhibition or in a studio.
In PREMATURE, the decontextualization of the photo of the painting constitutes the main innovation compared to the past. Here, the original painting serves only as a matrix to be augmented by the mean of photography, which leads to its photo print, intended as the definitive piece of art.
De Benedetto, with his Augmented Klecksography Paintings, wants to point the focus on the investigation of the unconscious through the creative process, where the artist is not in plain control on the formation of the piece.
Freeing the chance and the instinct to collaborate with, the artist witness the materialization of the infinite possibility of the matter in shapes that deal with the subconscious, allowing the interpretation.
“Take each PREMATURE revelation as a mirror for refecting yourself into the work of art”.
