SCULPTURE

AND RELIEF 2020s

thrown into the world, 2024-25

Over the past year, I’ve been working on this series of ceramic reliefs, and sculptures. Each relief is modelled on nature’s terms, so to speak, letting the material come into its own.

The three ceramic reliefs from the series "Thrown into the World" (Archive Numbers 270, 271, and 272)

explore the beauty of chance, the strike of a moment in a movement, preventing the ego from interfering.

Thrown into the world 2024-25, is a new series of ceramic reliefs and sculptures. The works appears “untouched”, except for the decisive gesture of the hand that created them.

Thrown Into the World showcases Eli’s latest “untouched” ceramic reliefs, some of which are cast in silicone rubber for the exhibition at Tings Art in Lisbon.

Eli’s playful use of rubber, with its soft-yet-tough doll feel, transforms classic clay reliefs into something totally fresh-funky, cool, and surprisingly tactile. The precision of the rubber impressions is striking.

Rubber might not seem noble, but in Eli’s hands, it’s absolutely contemporary. There’s a certain irony here – progress pulling us forward and backward at the same time: from humanity’s first material to one that seems to be our last.

happenings in colored rubber, 2024

The fossil-like surface, which I have always been moved by, reflects traces of lives ending, the frozen moment when a living being turns into a fossil, the position they land in forever, is often very beautiful in a pure and scientific sort of way.

I use my body as a tool in the raw clay, which is later cast in rubber and mounted on canvas".

See earlier rubber works from the series Performance in Clay, 2010

Fossils in rubber, 2023

' ... Eli Benveniste's latest sculpture project consists of a series of feet, detached from such diverse figures as a ballet dancer, the fairy tale Klods-Hans and a particularly sexually excited Japanese woman, taken from a woodcut that Benveniste has hanging in his bedroom ... '

Trine Ross, 2020

FEET, 2020

Why Feet? I began doing them already in Portugal last summer - long before we knew anything about the corona virus and the consequences we all would have to deal with.

A work process often begins by with the circumstances we find ourselves in. In this case I had to do smaller sculptures, if I wanted to work in my newly restored studio in Portugal; sizes which later could be transported back to Italy in our car. But I also Liked the idea of looking closely into a specific detail of the body.

But why feet exactly? To me a foot is a kind of sculpture in itself, it has this particular triangular form, similar to the rhythm a conductor draws in the air, with his beat.

A form who closes upon itself in a very natural way. I discovered that they could be turned upside down, stand, lay and be distorted in every way and be expressive even with a few touches.

I started with a smaller foot, just the foot itself with no ankle. It became the foot of the Boor bog man or the Tollund man, that was found in bog land after more than 2000 years. Then I did "Blockhead Hans" foot - from the story of H.C. Andersen, a joyful peasant’s foot and after that, the small delicate foot of a Japanese lady having an orgasm, as I had seen on the Japanese prints we have in our bedroom in Portugal. Always the same clenched feet like a fist, so well expressed and not to be misunderstood.

A new piece turned out to be a refugee’s foot; a foot that had walked thousands of miles, tired and hardened and marked by the many steps taken under heavy burdens.

Back in Italy the series evolved in a more imaginative direction. Apparently, it was not necessary to make a whole body, let alone a face, to express a condition or situation, it could all be contained in there, abstract and yet recognizable at the same time.

I squeezed the clay so it took shape from my hands and turned into a kind of a tree, which were followed by some more optimistic and playful feet. Lately I am making ballet feet. As they can’t stand on their own tip toe, I had to make the better half - and they became a pair - an etude.

The fact they were a pair, suggested some pretty wild compositions and sculpturally that's where it started to get really interesting, because something new, which I hadn’t expected, came up due to pure necessity. And I haven’t finished yet.

Eli Benveniste 2020

Photographer © Sylvain Deleu

Thanks to all who gave me their time and also a bit of their soul; allowing me to meld their features into clay

Portraits of my friends, 2021 ongoing

The portraits were chosen at random, it was more a coincidence: friends from Pietrasanta who had some time to dedicate or friends visiting from abroad. No intention really, no ambition for anything specific except to watch and let my hands follow my eyes and sometimes vice versa, when my hands "saw more than my eyes could see at the moment".

Thanks to all who gave me their time and also a bit of their soul; allowing me to meld their features into clay.

1. Georg Victor, German sculptor, Pietrasanta, 2015

2. Peter Poulsen, Danish poet, 2015

3. Ron Mehlman, American sculptor, Pietrasanta, 2016

4. Alena Matejka, Czech stone and glass sculptor, March 2016

5. Lars Kærulf Møller, museum director, May, 2016

6. Caterina Belle, teacher, Verona, May 2017

7. Raffaello Bassotto, photographer, Verona, May 2017

8. Dino Raymond Hansen, Danish film producer, October 2017

9. Giovanni Meloni, Veronese painter, May 2018

10. Trine Ellitsgaard, contemporary textile artist, June 2018

11. Henrik Norbrandt, Danish poet - with and without donkey ears as Henrik wanted, June 2018