After studying the classics, Benedetta Bonichi became interested in philosophy, ancient history, anthropology, philology and paleoethnology. In 1987 she read The Other Side of the Mirror by K. Lorenz; the book was a shocking illumination and as a result she commenced a period of prolific writing. In the years that followed Bonichi founded a theatrical agency and pursued various interests in music, dance and mime. It was not until 1991 when she left university that Bonichi started to draw and paint. Four years later, she came across an article written in Germany in 1934, entitled To See in the Dark, a piece of writing that had a profound effect on her painting oeuvre. A productive period followed and Bonichi created some fifty ‘sculptures’ made of shadows and in 1999 after many years of trial and experimentation she produced her first ‘X-rays’.

What strikes one in all of these works is “the impression of desert, the shadows of the sculptures, the traces of monuments, the vivid structure of the radiographs.” (Marcelle Padovani)

For Benedetta Bonichi, the play of the shadows both alters and discovers reality. Benedetta is obsessed with the ‘empreinte’, the impression and in her sketches she goes beneath the appearances of being in order to tease out the hidden matter, stripping off the subjective vision so as to rediscover, or simply to discover, their being in the pure state. In her search for truth Bonichi desires to go beyond, to grasp structures, to draw close to an essence that is not so much aesthetic but an overturning of every formal artistic canon.