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I have no idea what art is or was. Nor am I a professional critic of any kind. Nor am I really sure about writing in English. I just want to conveye my personal ideas of what my friend Ben was doing as an artist. And that's why I wrote for my New York friends and Suzi this Essay on Benedetto, who brought us together:
 "I can have it all my way, I'm the artist!"
Thus speaks the man Benedetto who wants to impose his will onto the world and every being. And thus echoes his shamanic alter-ego that tells him about the constant changes between men and women, the transitive nature of things and the contingency of the whole world. Consequently - as a painter and sculpturer - his subject are "the chances of life" la mode de camouflage artistique.
Part I
Benedetto lets sexy female bodies vanish in the folds of fabric (Casts) to give account for the temporability of mankind; he shows familiar furniture as the three-dimensional stage of a weird metamorphosia of the pattern of a wallpaper ("Embarkation");  he exhibits the masters of abstract expressonism dancing like Go-Go-Girls to the strokes of his brush (Pollock, Kline, Newman, De Kooning, Rothko, Still); he depicts happy bathers dissolving in the peaceful waves of swimming-pools (especially the blue one); his only picture of a house is some kind of an exploded view; he ties a deer "feet up" under the ceiling - bandaged as if wounded - and ironically paints a bullseye on it; he turns everyday's tools useless by welding words of antic wisdom into shovels: "Verita Vita Via"; he...
... mixes up what's out there with what's happening inside him. In his Ïuvre the actual world melts together with what happens to it in Benedetto's dreams. Thus he challenges reality with new readings/meanings of it and vexes the spectators with a concept of the universe as a living, changing - and changeable place. That's his kind of humor. And "humor is the appropriate attitude to change the worldÇ, as Bertolt Brecht put it.
Really! Benedetto's work hints at a possible future of the world. Everything is unfinished to him, his world is still in a spin. And beyond all aesthetic implications "of expressing an order of time in an order of space, he inspires us with new perspectives on people, objects, subjects and ourselves. And he makes us think about how we would like to form our world tomorrow.
And while looking at his paintings it is fun to discover what the objects represented originally were and to appreciate what he turned them into: It is fun to discover the "visible strokes of paint and the relief of crusty pigment which violate both the continuity and texture of the reprensented surfaces". It is fun to find an old piece of a tomato-can-label in Jackson Pollock's shirt, a piece of a chinese paper in Mr. Still's head, an animal's eye in the middle of another painting (work in progress), a lotus-leaf in the paint of Doppelgänger...
Ex tempore:
I guess I know why Benedetto hates rock-music. Rock-musicians also try to impose their will onto the world to make it move according to their rhythm. And maybe Benedetto feels that outstanding bands like The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Rage Against The Machine, Cult etc. (we're not talking about androids like Madonna or Jacko) are kind of acoustic competitors to him or his art. So he dislikes the average together with the avantgarde because he claims it is his job and nobody else's to make the world move. (And of course not the job of these "fucking bastards".)
But why does Benedetto like jazz then? Didn't Coltrane, Bird, Miles and the whole bop-community also make the world go round in a new speed? I think Benedetto can still love jazz because jazz has its best creative times already had. He can love it because it changed the world, it did what he still wants to do - but it doesn't do it any more. At least not the jazzmusicians Benedetto really loves.
Part II
In the late 80's Benedetto started to hide the world behind artistic veils rather than to re-dream it. Things vanished behind the gesture of expression. What remained of Bendetto's dreams of a possible world in the "Vortexes" for example seems to me like a nightmare. Similar in "Chasing the Dragon" which is a thick inevitable maze covering the whole canvas.
In the series "Schreier", "Bolus", "Kaplan" etc. Benedetto concentrates on strange formal structures that look scaring - like webs. All these paintings are named after people, they all are dyptichs, two halves close together like the two parts of a..., are they all representations of brains? Here Benedetto's work loses the foothold on reality and its humor...
But Benedetto takes care. All of a sudden, he cuts the thicket through: He reminds us that not only the world but also his work is unfinished and open. Consequently he becomes the curator of his own Oeuvre by digesting what he did before. He tears his water colors apart and re-assembles them (Collages), he re-reads/re-writes "Doppelgänger" and turns it into a scene from paradise: with snakes, giraffes, horses and not to forget Mr. Benedetto "Adam" Bianchi himself, the chronicler of eternal changes.
Part III
So to speak, Benedetto appears as the American brother of Baron Münchhausen from Germany, the great 19th century storyteller and rider on the canonball, who claimed to have pulled himself out of the swamp by his own wig. So, go ahead Benedetto, pull!
To make a long story short, I appreciate very much what you did, Benny.
Ulrich Leschak, July 1995
The displayed painting "Masterpiece" was completed in New Hampton July 1985 and depicts
Pollock, Kline, Newman, De Kooning, Rothko, Still.
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