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CONTACT INFORMATION:

The Benini Studio
& Sculpture Ranch
377 Shiloh Road
Johnson City, Texas USA 78636
830-868-2247 (Texas)
830-868-5244 Studios Building
830-868-5224 Studios Building

 

PAINTINGS
of the 90's

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Benini’s move to Hot Springs, Arkansas in the late 80’s added a new dimension to his work. What had started in the mid-80s as a simple exploration into the world of painterly illusion using simple geometric formulas rendered in bright primary colors, evolved into compositions of various elements, a kind of space-age still lifes. It was Benini’s response to the lushness of nature in the hills of Arkansas, so similar to his native environment in Imola, Italy. Paintings of this period reached their apogee in the “target series” in which Benini’s use of intense colors next to each other in a timeless pattern of concentric circles forces the viewer’s brain to unexpected choices and darkened after-images The geometric paintings incorporating these effects have been of interest to psychologists and scientists of the mind. See, for example, Benini’s “Genesis I”, on the 1998 premiere cover of the Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research, a publication of Purdue University. While Benini lived in Arkansas, during the daytime, he often worked in the hills and woods that he owned, first in the high plateau known as the Boston Mountains in the northwest Arkansas Ozarks, then 275 acres near Hot Springs National Park in the crystal-rich Ouachita Mountains. In these outdoor activities, he found natural materials that he combined – by welding or joining to steel - to create a series of three-dimensional assemblages. These works, often abstract in nature, sometimes of whimsical character, range in size from a few inches to 20 feet in height. At night Benini would paint in his studio usually until 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, a lifetime habit of working at night that allows him uninterrupted, quality painting time. Through the 1990’s, the paintings were executed on canvas stretched over aluminum plates that are mounted on brackets. In September, 1999, the Beninis moved to the Hill Country of Texas, west of Johnson City, and bought a ranch owned, at one time, by President L. B. Johnson. The physical qualities of this area, 15 miles from Luckenbach, and 50 miles from Austin, resemble certain Mediterranean regions, and promised a new bounty of inspirations.