Rita di Benedetto, Cratères, 2023, Mixed Media

Acrylic & charcoal on canvas Rita di Benedetto is a French visual artist born in 1952 who lives and works in Toulouse, France. Her painting is intended to be sensual, no-conceptual, contemplative, with a radionic effect as its raison for being , calling on the different waves of form present in nature and the universe. It essentially responds to the principle of inner necessity, already mentioned by Kandinsky. Purely self-taught, she never stopped painting and after studying law, the artist preferred to devote myself to my artistic vocation. Her artistic journey proved to be a logical evolution in pictorial practice passing through all the currents of the history of Painting in its Modern Art period: Figurative, Symbolism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Cubism, Lyrical Abstraction… while experimenting with many techniques: projections, drippings, collages, spray painting... Subsequently, and for several years, the interest arose for me to treat Volume Light and Matter with as supports, first the sphere in all its states, then the cylinder, where by working on the gradient also precise as well as fast, she liked to align tubes side by side thus giving birth to the 3rd dimension by optical effect. At the same time, interested in the properties of colour while preparing for an internship, she discovered the Slit Experiment of Young, physicist who verified the wave nature of light and noted the strange similarity of its experience with her Tubes. She then adopted this motif from 2011 to 2015 to create compositions that Rita named Young Device. These vertical structures invariable in their width, often more than 2 meters high, these Private Altars, inviting to contemplation. Then the static cylinder came to life, fragmented, deformed, to then become the cone, which she declined in the form of wavy structures taking on the appearance of metallic or silky materials: Smooth metallic undulations, brilliant then decorated, engraved as Chinoiseries, then draped, sumptuously stained with gold or silver. Rita then suddenly felt the irrepressible urge to damage these undulating structures, to scratch them, to dig them, to stain them, to crack them, to blister them, to injure them, to crater them...