CURA.

The self-portrait sketched by Elisabetta Benassi in her last anthological exhibition Autoritratto al Lavoro at MACRO museum in Rome is rather the result of deliberate acts of diversion, a choreography of contradictory hints that make the outlining of the artist’s identikit an almost unattainable mission. Transceivers of conflicting impulses, spectators are undoubtedly key players in this intriguing search, aimed at spotting the fleetingness of the artist’s self. On the other hand, Benassi seems the one having more fun in the unruled playground she built, scenery of an adventurous hide-and-seek.

In the show, the gaze is constantly challenged by the apparition —and the functional concealment— of works from over two decades, dismissing any chronological narration. Time unfolds as a cursed loop, as the one of the mechanic piece Senza titolo (La vie à crédit) (2006). Whatever existed before, becomes present. History is a malleable matter that can be subverted by a simple gesture, such as the act of turning a picture from recto to verso, which marks her renowned series All I Remember (2010-ongoing). Not by chance, the artist decides to open up the show by crashing the idea of death itself, riding her motorcycle and playing football with the doppelgänger of Pier Paolo Pasolini in her iconic videos Timecode and You’ll Never Walk Alone (2000).

Her body becomes the driver of the continuous activation of energy flows, enhanced by the dialectic relation of its unpredictable appearance and disappearance: the artist could suddenly show up, as promised in Due marziane a Roma (En attendant A&B) (2024), or maybe not. The body dematerializes from the void silhouettes of the motorcycle jackets Exodus (2001) and Bettagol (2000), seeming to gasify and spread through the sound installation Ordine e disordine (2013–2024), where two female voices enumerate a list of works by Alighiero Boetti. Here, the random sequence created by AI allows for a poetic re-signification of titles and concepts. By doing so, the artist chases a proximity that demystifies the sacredness of the Masters through spontaneous intrusions, as well as in the work La mano di Dio (2024), where a thick bronze nail pierces the cast of the ‘mythic’ hand of Pablo Picasso.