Jacopo Benassi's '1943' Transforms Maternal Loss into Photographic Ghost

In the latest installment of ArtsLife's 'Un'opera a settimana' series, Italian artist Jacopo Benassi presents his 2022 work '1943,' a diptych born from the death of his mother, Giusy. The piece originated when Benassi, at age 18 in 1989, painted a copy of Caravaggio's 'Deposition.' That painting hung above his mother's bed for over thirty years. After her death in 2022, the painting was removed, leaving a lighter trace on the wall—a 'ghost.' Benassi photographed this absence and paired it with a shot of the bedside table from the same room, creating an intimate counterpoint. He describes the process as immediate and necessary, a recognition rather than construction. The work intertwines his youthful artistic gesture, his mother's life, the passage of time, and their superimposition into a single image. For Benassi, '1943' collapses different moments into one visual space, becoming both a story and its residue. He states the image does not represent something but is something that happened, marking the point where his practice becomes inevitably personal.