GAM is pleased to present the Jacopo Benassi exhibition. Criminal Self-Portrait , born from the arrival in the collection of the work Panorama di La Spezia , 2022, acquired for the Museum collections by the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art. The acquired work is a self-portrait in which the artist never appears, just as the human presence does not appear. Instead, photos of plants appear taken in the dark of night in public gardens, plants that cover, at least partially, some panoramas of the Ligurian city painted with a vaguely nineteenth-century flavour. Overlapping photos and canvases, held together by large straps, are hung on two plasterboard walls which for a while served as a temporary studio for Benassi, while he prepared an exhibition in La Spezia, his hometown.

Starting from that occasion, Benassi's work has progressively moved from photography to a shadowy space between photos and paintings, between photos and plaster casts. His photographic work, developed under the sign of the contrast between the background darkness and the flash light fired mercilessly on each subject, has momentarily chosen as its place of choice and hiding the non-visible part of things, the one that remains guarded or a prisoner between one frame and another, between one image and another, what you can only imagine or desire.

Behind the installation of Panorama di La Spezia , used as if it were a screen, appears Series of hanging portraits , 2024, created for the exhibition, a work that takes the process of cancellation to its extreme consequences, presenting a heavy sandwich of frames of which only two backs can be seen. They are photographic portraits of famous people (Valentino, Nan Goldin, John Wayne, Snow White, Ando Gilardi...) mixed with some self-portraits, all condemned to invisibility and thus paradoxically reactivated by Benassi in their ability to be images, to have new evocative power to way of denial. Among the hidden self-portraits there is also the one chosen for the communication of the exhibition in which Jacopo Benassi looks at us from behind the long bangs of a woman's hairstyle and under that fixed gaze we find ourselves wondering about the raw flavor of truth that a disguise can have . A truthful masking and a disguised truth is what photography can be, welcomed in the beginning as evidence of reality and then revealed, in its now long history, ready for a thousand reversals between reliability and fiction. It is in some way a criminal self-portrait, not only because it could ideally belong to the sad tradition that wanted transvestites, until a few decades ago, actually registered and photographed, but also because it presents the typical codes of the signal portraits that Benassi brings into play in that image and in many others, since its beginnings, thanks to the teaching of Sergio Fregoso and the reading of Wanted! by Ando Gilardi, primer on the aesthetics of judicial photography.