Alessandro, Maria—a friend from La Spezia—and I arrive at Piazza Brin at 9.30 am, half an hour before our appointment, and decide we should treat ourselves to a snack and a quick espresso. The closest bar, opposite the monumental mosaic fountain by Mirko Basaldella dominating the square, has a wood-framed entrance and a funny, spheric porch light painted as a balding, bespectacled head. It’s one of those retro “Bar-Tabacchi” like there are many in Italy, combining a coffee bar with a licensed tobacco shop. The tabaccheria counter stands immediately on the right, a brightly illuminated pattern of cigarette packs and scratchers. Hidden behind it, Jacopo Benassi is taking a nap crouched on a stool.
“Jacopo!” I wake him up. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
I expected to find him in his studio, located just round the corner at the end of the street. But of course he’s not there. Like many artists, he loves—needs—to spend time at his favorite bar nearby.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to get back to work,” he says after a brief exchange. It takes a minute before we’re in front of the studio, a white-painted glass door protected by carefully locked metal fences.
Benassi is worried about the mess—“I didn’t expect you so early”—but upon entering, the space is surprisingly empty, except for his folding bike, metallic hooked chains dangling from the ceiling, and a large mirror placed against the wall. In July, he transferred most of his stuff to PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan, for his latest installation and performance, Studio Manifesta, where he presented his studio “on wheels.” The furniture and artworks have returned—but now they’ve been stored on the mezzanine, alongside hundreds of cardboard tubes containing his photos, leaving space downstairs for Benassi to practice his upcoming performances.
In the past ten years, Benassi has done many different things, mixing different media, without necessarily mastering the relative techniques: performances, sculptures, installations, painting, even playing musical instruments he had never touched before—ammittedly not having any serious musical education. “When I try to control a situation too much, looking for perfection, it fails. Maybe in a positive way, but to me, it’s a failure. Whereas if I don’t control it, I let go, I embrace my limits and show them to the public. It’s an act of honesty.”
What he truly masters, though, is photography. “I started at 18. I’m 56 now, so I’ve been taking photos for 38 years—can you believe it? At this point, whether I’m good or bad at it, I consider myself a photographer. I know how to take a photo—even if it’s bad, I know how to do it. I always have my camera with me.”
A vivid, black-and-white portrait of a butterfly hangs at the center of an empty wall, reflected by the huge mirror. It’s encased in one of Benassi’s signature frames—a composition of hand-cut wooden sticks messily screwed together which, he says, contribute to making his photos more similar to sculptures, three-dimentional pieces of art. The work is completed by a single dried rose branch that symmetrically divides the picture. It’s full of thorns, but there’s no flower. “It’s called Farfalla con armatura. An armored butterfly.”
«When I try to control a situation too much, looking for perfection, it fails. Maybe in a positive way, but to me, it’s a failure.»
Thorns recur constantly throughout his work. For the first issue of EVERYTHING we commissioned him a photographic feature about everyday life in Palazzo Brandolini, where Laguna~B was established in 1994 and where part of the family still lives. Two double-page spreads are dominated by bare, thorny rose branches, emerging from the blackest black of the background. I suppose he shot them in the garden, though who can tell? “Thorns are always there—but without flowers,” he says. “The flowers have gone off to protest. They’re protesting against a world that’s falling apart.” He never pulls up plants unless they’re dead, so a farmer friend regularly supplies him with dry branches. “Thorns are armor. I can’t stand it when florists remove them: a rose has no meaning without thorns. So I do the opposite. I remove the rose; I make it disappear.”
His studio looks like habitable, bulletproof armor, too. Light barely filters through the French doors, all covered in thick paint and locked from outside. Past the entrance, we’re admitted into a more intimate (and cluttered) area. There’s a worn-out armchair with flower upholstery, and a sofa partially hidden under drapes of boxers and black t-shirts hanging from a rack. A drumset stands next to the washing machine; an old, wooden desk—engraved with all kinds of texts and sketches, and embellished with the occasional sacred image—dominates the room, under a dense spiderweb of cables. Bare light bulbs and musical instruments dangle from above, including a flugelhorn and a saxophone which, at some point during the day, he would start playing. Then, grabbing a megaphone, he would stage an improvised Laguna~B commercial, screaming, “People, come buy some Laguna~B glasses! Buy Laguna~B glasses!” into the cone.
Pictures and collages crowd the walls, alongside dry leaves and the occasional plastic lobster, his animal alter ego. Jacopo Benassi shares a place with a friend nearby, and he’s in the process of buying an apartment, in Piazza Brin of course. Yet for the moment, when he’s not visiting his partner in Bourgogne, he prefers to live here, in this 70 sqm nest that he only occasionally leaves for the beloved bar. (It’s him who portrayed Enrico, the owner, in the white rounded lampshade outside: an expressive portrait indeed.
Jacopo Benassi—who is now represented by two galleries and travels the world to perform or install his work—was born in La Spezia in 1970 and developed an interest in photography as a teenager, attending concerts at local squats that offered darkrooms where he could develop his film for free. He dropped out of school at 14 to work as a mason and then as a mechanic, repairing cars. One of his first pictures, a color portrait of his aunt, still hangs from a wall in the studio. “I never thought I’d become an artist. I grew up working, trying to make ends meet. I don’t think I was a talent.” For a while, his activities ranged from taking cover pictures for local bands’ albums or selling homemade fanzines, to house-painting and other random repairing jobs. It was in Milan, where he moved at 26, that he began a career as a full-time photographer for fashion magazines and brands. His approach was distant from the commercial style his clients were pursuing, and he soon grew emotionally disconnected (and annoyed) from the job. Eventually, he simply realized he didn’t like it at all. In 2006 he “ran away” and returned to La Spezia, looking to reconnect with his true artistic self. It happened when, in 2010, he opened Btomic with some friends.
Located just round the corner from Piazza Brin, Btomic was a “a laboratory where I could finally create whatever interested me.” During its five-year existence, the venue established itself as a hotspot of La Spezia’s counterculture, functioning as an avantgarde club, concert hall, or simply hang-out spot for the local creative community. With peeling walls, vintage furniture, crystal chandeliers, and a “bohemian atmosphere,” Benassi says today it would be considered a “hipster place.” But at the time, it was an absolute novelty, especially for a provincial town like La Spezia. The space hosted artists from the international underground scene and printed its own fanzine.
Today, Btomic is no more than four rolled-down shutters, the only trace of its glorious past a circular, white plaster bas-relief, depicting two moose mating, marking the former entrance: it’s the work of Augustin Laforêt, his partner of 13 years, a plasterer and restorer. But the club’s influence on Benassi’s artistic career is undeniable.
At PAC, Benassi brought archive photos—pornographic photos, he says—which he strapped together in stacks so that only the frames and the backs were visible, but not the subjects. “So much of my work is about getting the viewer to reflect on what lies beyond that photo. If you see a frame turned on the back, with a title, your brain starts to think. For me, this is politics. With social media, TikTok, and so on, images come to us, and we never let them go. But if you see a scene that you can’t quite make out, you’re forced to construct the image yourself, and your brain gets to work. I think making the brain work is a very important political act today.”
Plus, after many years in the game, he doesn’t feel like showing anything anymore. “They expected all kinds of crazy stuff—penises, sex, feet, slippers. Erotic things, intense stuff. But when I realized that my photos were being seen as provocative, I stopped. It didn’t make sense anymore. Why should I care about being provocative?” For years, Benassi has been unapologetically showing naked bodies, gay sex, and dirty feet under the brutal light of his flash. With works of the likes of FAGS—where the artist documents his own sex life over 25 years, since he announced his homosexuality—or Paris is in Asia—where actor and director Asia Argento is portrayed in intimate, hot scenes, partying at a club and even making out—it’s not difficult to understand why the public has labeled Benassi as such. Yet he insists it was all done “in a very naive way: I did what I thought was natural.” At the beginning, he says, his photos were a way to assert himself; “to reclaim my homosexuality; my lack of physicality; my lack of beauty.” For decades, his sexuality has been central to his art. “The moment I told people I was gay I also understood how to use light in my photography. I don’t know how these two energies were connected, but they were. It was then that I realized that my light was that of the flash. From then on, I’ve always used it.”
«A rose has no meaning without thorns. I can’t stand when florists remove them. So I do the opposite. I remove the rose.»
He only shoots in black and white—“colors distract me”—and the indiscriminate use of the flash remains his most distinctive trait. He describes it as “a struggle with daylight.” He credits the late La Spezia photographer Sergio Fregoso as the one who taught him how to look. “He noticed how the light I was using ‘erased the light’ of the scene. Such a Lynchian idea, a light erasing other lights. But it’s true: my light covers, eats the light of the day. Daylight always wins, but I constantly try to beat it.” He’s also known for shooting really quick. It took him only a couple hours to take the pictures inside Palazzo Brandolini, and most of the time he spent chatting with Diane Von Fürstenberg, Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, and other subjects he portrayed. “I need no more than two seconds to take a picture.” He doesn’t care about the perfect photo at all. “I like to feel like I’m stealing the moment.”
Yet a photographer is not the same as an artist—a distinction Benassi often points out. Perhaps it’s precisely this shying away from perfection, this shameless display of his own limits, that makes him one of the most relevant artists of the contemporary Italian scene.
“With sound, performances, or photography, I try to let my limits run free. It’s an act of pure honesty. My work has limits, but at least it’s honest. This is who I am.” Take his frames, for example. “I am not a meticulous person. At the beginning, I tried to make them look good, and I ruined them. Now I show up with the frames all smashed up—it’s a mystery how they don’t fall apart—and I win. It’s not that I decide to make them badly. I just decide to make them, that’s all.”
While photography remains central to his practice, he says he’s in the process of “moving beyond the whole image thing.” He has recently inaugurated his first site-specific work of land art, in a forest near Vicoforte, in the Langhe region. It’s called Immagine di luce, and it’s a powerful flash-like light installed on a tall wooden pole, decorated by large clay thorns. Controlled by a timer, the light illuminates, at regular intervals, an old fountain called Fontana del Foo, “It serves as a natural theater: in the past, locals used it as a stage for plays.” The images the installation produces are temporary and ephemeral, only visible when the light is on. They’re not recorded or archived in any way. “That’s a way to overcome the problem of [producing] a picture. By eliminating the camera completely, I’m stepping out of my comfort zone.” He was invited by Associazione VIA, who curates a land art program in the Langhe region. For the opening ceremony, he directed the village’s marching band.
Since the four of us entered the space, he’s had one obsessive thought: “I need to clean the toilet. Because Fondazione Benassi is in there.” Ah, the Fondazione. I visit the minuscule space a few hours later: there’s an “occupied bookstore,” a sticker recites, just above the wc—shelves with a selection of books by bruno, the bookshop and design studio near our Venice office. Dozens of his framed pictures cover the walls up to the ceiling, including a portrait of Terry Richardson he shot in Naples in 2005. In place of toilet paper, a flappy roll of instant camera pictures. On post-its on the wall, he jotted down a few notes for an upcoming exhibition and performance at Macro, in Rome.
«Such a Lynchian idea, a light erasing other lights. But it’s true: my light covers, eats the light of the day.»
Cleaning won’t take him more than five minutes and will not, to be honest, have much effect. Before grabbing the spray, he had to change into his slippers (outside he wears Adidas slides). “When I’m inside the studio, I have to put them on. I just can’t help it.” In Benassi’s world, slippers are important. In 2017 he published a book, Slippers, cataloging “all the slippers I used since I first found out about my homosexuality.” They’re a significant element of his coming out: he was a kid when he saw a neighbor standing on the doorstep, wearing a pair, and felt attracted to him—“actually more to the slippers than to the man himself.” He avoided this type of shoes for a long time. “Slippers annoyed me; I hated them, really. I didn’t want to wear them for fear that people would think I was gay.” He came out many years later, at 26. “Only then I began wearing and photographing them.”
Now that he is an established artist, Benassi says he feels more vulnerable compared to the past, when he was struggling. “I grew up just surviving, working. Today I have two galleries that sell my art, and a bank account that allows me to make a good living, but ironically, I suffer more.” His studio is located right next to the local soup kitchen, where low-income residents are given daily meals for free. “I see the old folks who can’t make ends meet and come for a hot meal—it breaks my heart. One might say, you suffer, but then you do nothing. I don’t know what to do. I have less armor. I suffer for the world, for the wars going on, for what Palestinians are enduring. I was lucky that I didn’t become successful right away. I entered the world of contemporary art from the very bottom. I ended up there because certain things just fell into place—I didn’t plan it. I still don’t know how to handle it today. Look at me, here, like an animal in its den. In here, I’m everywhere—my studio protects me. It’s my barricade of thorns.”
P.S. A few hours before publishing, Benassi says there’s something important he should add to the story. “Over this past year, I’ve brought Francesca Calvaresi on board as my studio manager. Since I started working with her, my life as an artist has improved significantly.”