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Osart Gallery and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro are pleased to present Cancellare per vedere (Erasing to see), a double solo exhibition featuring the works of Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922 – Rome, 2017) and Betty Danon (Istanbul, 1927 – Milan, 2002).

 

The exhibition features a selection of works dating back to 1976, the year of the artists' initial encounter. The title is drawn from a text written by Bentivoglio regarding La Memoria del segno sonoro (The Memory of the Sound Sign), a work presented by Danon at the now-seminal exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio (Materialization of Language).

The relationship between the two artists was profoundly intellectual and theoretical in nature. Mirella Bentivoglio was among the first to recognize the artistic significance of Betty Danon’s practice, though their fellowship was characterized by complexity and, at times, underlying tension.Our knowledge of their first encounter stems from a document authored by Danon, in which she chronologically recounts the evolution of her practice. Il caso dei casi (The Case of Cases), as it is titled, serves as a key text for the study of her oeuvre. Within its pages, the entry for the year 1976 contains a single, poignant notation: '76: encounter with Mirella Bentivoglio'. It is evident that, for Danon, this meeting held significant weight. Both women possessed a cosmopolitan background and lived with the acute awareness of being firmly situated within the present, while simultaneously projected towards the future through the development of their respective artistic idioms.

Mirella Bentivoglio was not merely an artist, but also a prolific curator and art critic. Her intellectual stance was characterized by a certain rigidity balanced with vibrancy: she began her trajectory in verse poetry—a field she explored from her early twenties—before pivoting toward more experimental terrains, notably those of Concrete Poetry and Visual Poetry. Her oeuvre fluctuates between the meticulous and essential and the monumental; yet, in every instance, her primary catalyst remains rooted in language: language in relation to the image, to matter, to the object, and to the environment.

Among the archetypes she investigated, the egg, the tree, and the stone book are the most emblematic; indeed, this exhibition focuses primarily on the latter. In these book-objects, linguistic artifice and the inherent tension of the verbal premise are deconstructed and transformed. The book is no longer a device for communication or dissemination; it is divested of its original function, shifting instead toward an "other" functionality—one that is fundamentally visual, semiological, and contemplative.

Betty Danon was characterized by a reserved and discreet nature, a quality that permeated her practice. In the 1980s, she deliberately withdrew from conventional art circuits to continue producing and disseminating her thought within the realm of Mail Art. Her mark is meticulous and intimate, to the point of becoming "silent." She worked with sound and its interpretation through a visual language developed from Jungian symbology, identifying the circle and the square as two primary elements.

Over time, Danon implemented a process of synthesis and abstraction, whereby the circle was reduced to its centre (a dot) and the square to its side (a line). These dots and lines are thus signs of cosmological origin; within the body of her work, they remain immutable elements, even when articulated through heterogeneous formal solutions.

 

Although they emerge from distinct temperaments, both artists share a common objective: the transcendence of the purely utilitarian function of the sign and the word.

Mirella Bentivoglio and Betty Danon represent two sides of the same coin: while the former "solidifies" thought within the weight of stone and objects, the latter "distills" it into the purity of the dot and the line. Both, however, teach us that language can begin exactly where the word ceases to exist.