BENJIE BASILI MORRIS
Benjie Basili Morris graduated in March 2010 with the maximum of the marks at the Art Academy of Rome rapidly distinguishing himself because of his impressive style, defined by saturated chromatics, violent light and shade effects, classical styles, all borrowed from late Renaissance (Bronzino, Correggio, Tiziano, Dűrer) and Baroque masters (Caravaggio, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Hans Holbein the Younger, Spagnoletto, Rubens) and applied to very forceful subjects, emblematic figures of chthonic eroticism who seem to emerge out of that fundamental chaos described by Nietzsche in his works and that Jung reports as eternal models, results of the sedimentation of experiences repeated by mankind over millennia. Primigenial images that are unconsciously present inside all of us, similar to the platonic Idea without time and immortal.
These 'a rebour' aesthetics, going backwards into the meanders of the psyche and history of art, cannot be considered as simple and anachronistic revivals of past models just because most part of art activities in the Twentieth Century rotates around the figure. On the contrary, it is starting by revisiting bodily expression into contemporary art, from historical avant-garde to body art, and embodied in his condition of post-modern man, that this artist conceives his action with a cunning eye due to his knowledge of other medias like comics, cinema, photography.
Through the use of real models, chosen with the skill of a movie director, Morris is able to create his personal theatre of memories, an alchemical proceeding able to transmute, by means of pictorial exercise, the base matter of flesh into the spiritual gold of idea, releasing its repressed energy set free for symbolic purposes.
In his works light and shade, good and evil, spiritual and material, feminine and masculine are opposite elements that simplify the duplicity of reality, the balance necessarily precarious of a being out of time. The bodies, depicted with bright colors, are only the final and finite manifestation of this proceeding and they would like to suggest and aesthetically show higher realities, concepts that come before man or that exist beyond him.
