BENEDETTA SEGALA (Italy 1978) is an Italian artist, writer and art curator who currently lives in Malaysia and is well known for her geometric distortions and original interpretations in painting, in an intimate relationship between aesthetics and nature. These techniques originate from constant research into light and colour, of which the ultimate goal is to reach visual thinking.
Shapes are treated as if they were geometries; the closer you get to the truth the more the geometric structure of things become readable. The abstraction of geometry that can replicate itself infinitely and the concreteness of truth converge, culminating in a pictorial and visual meditation.
What is painting, if not the construction of a world on a two-dimensional surface, the construction of a sort of parallelepiped of air, as the art historian Berenson called it, in which an action takes place? A fictitious illusory world, becomes all the more credible and realistic when the painter builds that universe with the ability to assess light. Light is what shows us the world in real life, a world that would otherwise appear dark or not at all. Space and time are relative to one and only absolute, and this is the light.
This play of projective geometries, of extroflexions imagined as blades of light that flow along the walls, as if they were damp matter that rests on the things they reveal, does not paint any space in particular. Instead, they remain very real in the smallest details. It is a timeless nowhere, making chromatic matter the absolute protagonist, because what is silent stimulates the other to speak.
Visual fields open to create depth by alternating areas of oil colour rendered through light and transparent glazing or thick impasto. These fields also blur the spatial planes and in this way play with the usual perception of things. Far-near, presence-absence is superimposed in an intrinsic duality between real and unreal. The light reveals the presence of when we will no longer be there, making memory alive but not only, and fixing the moment in its perpetual existence.
It’s a painting that reflects directly on the very meaning of painting. Here, it becomes a pretext that speaks of the solitary moment of creation, of the silence and concentration experienced in imagining and forging the ideas to be transmitted to the canvas. The antechamber of creation, that phase invisible to the spectator’s eyes but which represents the existential fulcrum of every artist’s life, including her own.

EDUCATION
2003 Contemporary Art Degree D.N.S.E.P. Master 5 – Luminy Faculty of Fine Arts – Marseille, France
1997 Secondary Degree Diploma – Giulio Romano High School Design – Mantova, Italy

She obtained her Master’s Degree of Fine Art at ESBAM Luminy University Marseille, France in 2003 and her Diploma of Art and Design at the Giulio Romano Institute of Art Mantova, Italy in 1997. Meanwhile she spent also three years in Bologna to attend Accademia di Belle Arti, where she was profoundly marked from the teaching of the minimalist painter Gabriele Partisani.

2001, she discovers Asia for the first time with an ERASMUS scholarship (Thailand-Laos-China-Malaysia).

2003, after she obtains her diploma, she has her first solo exhibition at the MAC (Musée d’Art Contemporain) contemporary art museum of Marseilles. She has produced since more than ten solo exhibitions and a number of group exhibitions in several galleries and institutions in Italy, France, Dubai, USA, Malaysia and Singapore; with her artworks being collected by private international collectors. Benedetta’s major series are Temporale, Sensus, Mirages, Acquatica and Esistere.

In a world distracted by cliché, by abstraction as distraction, by the glitz beneath the glitter, Segala’s abstract paintings boldly explore subtlety in shade, in tone, in form and line to cut through this tinsel world and find the calm, cool space of truth. Modal shades, organic lines, abstract form working in harmony to create a unity of expression, to create a calm space of delicate simplicity through subtlety, to fill the void with meaning and give it purpose.

Viewing her work, one is drawn into the joy of color and form, into the essence of being, into existence rather than appearance. She uses color to create and mould sensations, sensations that are alive, full, pervasive, color and form that put us in intimate contact with ourselves and with the star-filled universe. It is a balance of reality as we experience it and imagination as we dream it. It is lyrical abstraction, the blending of perfect form with the formless flow of existence.