BENASSI LIBERO! Aesthetic of Friction at Palazzo Ducale, Genova

“Today I feel free. I’ve freed myself from a certain kind of photography, but without bitterness. Maybe I no longer need to define myself through any one medium. Maybe just free. Yes, free.”

This statement, made by Jacopo Benassi at the close of a recent interview, echoes throughout every corner of his exhibition at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, like a quiet yet uncompromising mantra. And yet, the freedom that permeates Jacopo Benassi libero! (Loggia degli Abati, 12 July to 14 September 2025) is anything but light. It’s a scratched, hard-won freedom, built from raw materials, stubborn choices, and images that refuse to be merely looked at or tamed.

From the very beginning, visitors are forced to reconsider their role. One of the first works encountered is Villa Croce, an installation created during Benassi’s residency at Palazzo Ducale in June 2025. It takes the form of a narrow tunnel saturated with graffiti, orange light, and slogans that feel ripped from a street protest. There’s no contemplative distance here, you are thrown directly into the body of the work, without protection. It’s a bold poetic stance.
“I can’t plan my work rigidly, because the process is entirely intuitive. I only understand what I want to do when I’m physically in the space.”

The arrangement of the works is both coherent and confrontational. The photographs, all strictly black and white, are mounted on raw wooden frames, wedged into crates, strapped with industrial belts. They’re not hung, not isolated, never singular. They’re “locked in,” as if awaiting a shipment that will never come. It’s a visual barricade, every image jammed against another, forming layers that deny any singular point of view.

This curatorial decision, unflinchingly supported by curator Francesco Zanot, mirrors Benassi’s own vision:
“Flash has always been my only light. It erases. It doesn’t add, it rewrites the scene.”

Benassi’s images are stripped of any technical ambiguity, no gradients, no constructed depth, no digital editing. Imperfection is the aesthetic program. Every frame feels like a raw take from reality, but is in fact an act of subtraction, showing only what’s necessary to generate tension.

His work is built on errors. When a performance goes too smoothly, he almost gets worried, and that anxiety is palpable throughout the show. If something goes wrong, it rings true. Benassi doesn’t distinguish between photography, installation, performance, painting, everything is contaminated, everything is material. Subjects, faces, feet, branches, mundane objects are treated with the same direct, almost brutal simplicity. The result is a visual density that challenges the eye, forcing it to move, to reposition, to recompose.

In many of his recent works, Benassi multiplies the frame, flips portraits upside down, or hides parts of an image behind others. In our last conversation, he admitted,
“I’ve stopped exhibiting my portraits. I turn them around, I hide them. Part of their power comes from their refusal to be seen.”

It’s a radical gesture, but not a cynical one. It’s not a conceptual game, it’s a sincere urgency, to protect the image in a time when images are consumed until they’re emptied out.

Materially, the work edges closer and closer to sculpture, and perhaps finds its truest expression there, in the act of displacing and positioning the pieces. Wooden panels become standalone works, heavy, physically imposing. Some are stacked on mobile carts, others look ready for transport but remain still. This is not an exhibition, it’s a permanent construction site, a place where photography ceases to be document and becomes organism.

At the heart of the central room, a giant butterfly is crushed beneath a frame, held down by a blue strap. It becomes the show’s central image, fragility and tension. Beauty and restraint. As if even the most delicate aesthetic needs something raw to survive.

The title Jacopo Benassi libero! then, takes on multiple meanings. A slogan, an ironic twist, a political cry, a moment of self-analysis. It acknowledges a difficult freedom, one that is never truly resolved.
As Benassi himself puts it,
“Working without controlling every aspect, that’s my identity. If I plan too much, the work becomes something that doesn’t belong to me.”

So, by the end of the exhibition, we didn’t leave with a sense of having “understood” something. We left with something sharper, the feeling of having been forced to look. Not at seductive aesthetics, but at friction, a raw, living material. A kind of resistance.

And in an age when everything is smooth, fast, fluid, Jacopo Benassi stays rough. And free. Free to resist. Free not to please.

Go see it.
And be ready to find conflict.