Alfonso Benadduce (Italy, 1974). Painter, director, actor and author, lives and works in Rome.
Since 1998, he created original works which were featured in important theaters and festivals, like Tragedy beyond Prometheus – Teatro Nuovo, Napoli (2000); Young prince’s death, performance created for the Volterra Festival (2001); Poor Richard III Archeological Museum, Capua (2005) ; Paradise Lost – dance-drama from John Milton, Leuciane Festival (2006); Study in presence of Hamlet – Mercadante Theatre, Naples (2010); The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Settembre al borgo Festival, Caserta (2010).
Invited by the art critic Achille Bonito Oliva at the international exhibitions of contemporary art – Le Opere e i giorni (2003) and Fresco Bosco (2006) – he has realized two theatre works: Ecstasy, mono-manias about Diana and Atteone – images by Pierre Klossowski, and Longing for the pillory. This latter show is drawn from his original, published text, from which he also drew his first experimental movie, nominee in 2008 at Riccione TTV Award – Performing Arts on screen.
With Libercolo dell’onta (Little book of offence), his first work in prose, he’s been nominated at the Viareggio Award in 2006. Meanwhile, he has been performing Sempre perdendosi (Always losing oneself), tragic poem the poet Silvia Bre has written and dedicated to his theatre.
He has held two solo exhibitions of his paintings: at R/R Space in Rome (2004), and at KunstFoerderVerein in Weinheim, Germany (2010).
His next solo exhibition will be in New York, September 2012, at One Art Space Gallery.
Artist statement
Surrendering to a necessity which is difficult to solve, Alfonso Benadduce is blindly committed to various art disciplines, preferring, according to circumstances, the one that guarantees the highest degree of truth.
“To me the gesture of painting, in its fierce loneliness, means being forced to get intimate with the dark. Assisted by the simple arms of canvas and some colors, I’m challenged by the image coming to the forefront, standing out, and showing with conscious otherness, to be more than the painter would ever suspect”.
His last paintings, oil on big and medium-size canvases, are flows of colors that capture as much black as possible, even when they get closer to depiction.