The sixth exhibition season at Wild Mazzini is centered around the theme of “betrayal”, a process through which the artist attempts to bridge the distance between insufficient or inexact data and their meaning, ends with Beniamino Servino’s solo exhibition, Visons Not Previsions.

The fourteen pieces on show – created with techniques inherent to graphics, art and architectural design – illustrate the concept of betrayal in eloquent and sometimes disturbing proportions.

The journey between real or imaginary cities superimposes the author’s architectural visions on the memories that each place embodies. Somewhere between an hypothesis of the past and a forecast of the future, the viewer is carried around a world of backgrounds, in which the present is displayed and expanded upon. The result is a project that seems to absorb elements of poetry, philosophy, mythology and science fiction.

The viewer’s attention is drawn to the works, as it investigates the boundary between what is easily recognizable and what, unexpectedly and majestically appears before them: towers and palaces, corners and arches, devoid of a human presence and yet so full of detail.

Beniamino Servino

Servino has been one of the most interesting names in Italian architecture over the last 20 years. Both visionary and ironic, he reinterprets the present through a personal vocabulary composed of memory and a desire for beauty. That what emerges most forcefully from his work is his commitment to redeem and renew architecture as a collective asset, a “public affair” par excellence, in a fight against the impoverishment of local culture and public space. This impoverishment has left dramatic, even violent, marks on the urban landscape and the surroundings of Caserta, but also on the national level in general. Beniamino Servino has published two books in which, through a dialogue between short texts and images, he narrates this thinking: Monumental Need, released in 2012, and Obvius, 2014.