2007 Ben

Il Ponte gallery has continued its exhibition season with a solo show dedicated to one of the most important figures in spreading the transgressive theories of Fluxus. A maestro “[…] in the systematic game of annexing to the universe of art everything that would seem to be outside of it […]”, Ben uses his childlike script to indicate everything that is art, and at the same time to remove the physical nature of every indicated object and make it rise into an abstract concept.
And thus the idea developed by exhibition is The limit of art with Ben, following the Duchamp tradition, calling into question all boundaries as to what can be seen as an artistic object. In an increasingly reckless game, where whatever his hand and its mark/script touches becomes art, Ben risks removing sense itself. As a result, his art becomes The art of the limit, fiercely hazardous, on the brink of totally annihilating values.
The exhibition is built on this pivotal topic for his work, and comprises over seventy works: canvases, papers, common and unexpected objects, which the artist redeems and removes from the memory of the past so they may testify to an apparently limitless way of thinking, in a constant game of chance. Ben himself set up the exhibition following a criterion of organised chaos, setting out the works in the gallery space as if they were divided by topic. It was almost as if he built different rooms (the bathroom, bedroom, …) where the visitor was made to stay, invited on a journey played out between texts and images in search of the answers to Ben’s provocations on the sense of our everyday life and feelings.