Benedetta Manzino

Her paintings do not depict the world, they open it. Through oil, handled with a freedom that defies convention, Benedetta Manzino turns the visible into a threshold: something to cross, not simply to observe. Each work is an invitation to look inward while looking at the canvas.

Maria Benedetta Manzino was born in Mortara in 1999. She studied Literature and Cultural Heritage at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli and today her practice unfolds entirely within the intimate, private space of her studio. Rooted in mystical visions that surface through the rhythm of daily life, her compositions seek equilibrium between geometry and colour, not as formal exercises, but as a means of opening. Each canvas is a portal through which perception shifts and transformation becomes possible. In her work, the mind and the hand are not the authors but the instruments to make the evolution happen.

Morpheus Gate was selected for Spirit Worlds, the sixth volume of TASCHEN's Library of Esoterica, a 520-page survey of visionary art spanning from cave paintings to contemporary works, edited by author and journalist Jessica Hundley. Within the volume, Manzino's painting is placed in dialogue with a work by Agnes Pelton, alongside pieces by Mark Rothko and Hilma af Klint.

Colour, in Manzino's practice, is not a choice, but a language. Her approach to pigment is rigorous and deeply intentional: iridescent, vibrating hues selected not for their aesthetic appeal but for their perceptual and neuro-emotional charge. Each tone is a tool, calibrated to draw latent emotions to the surface, to hold them, and to transform them. This chromatic thinking has a long lineage. From the early scientific diagrams of colour sensation to Hilma af Klint's private notebooks, where spheres of colour became maps of inner dimensions, the idea that colour acts directly on consciousness has driven some of the most radical artistic practices in history. Manzino works within this tradition, and extends it.

Her paintings reach inward, toward something older than memory. Through colour and vision, Manzino surfaces what has always been there: the ancient feminine, the ancestral root, the origin. In works like Unity - Trinity, Sang Real, Ovolo dato l'asse minore and Ancestors, genealogical lines, medieval echoes and layered symbolism converge into a single act of channeling.

Manzino's investigation of natural structures is rooted in the observation that geometry is not imposed on nature, it is inherent to it. Patterns that recur across scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic, become the subject of a formal inquiry in which painting functions as a tool for analysis. The canvas becomes a space where the macrocosm and the microcosm are held in the same frame.

The coexistence of a mathematical formula and a botanical species within a single title is not incidental. It reflects a precise methodological position: that abstract systems of order and organic form share the same underlying logic. The inward search, for meaning, for origin, for self, does not lead away from the natural world. It leads directly into it. To study the structures that repeat in nature is, in Manzino's practice, to study ourselves. We are not separate from the systems we observe. We are made of them.

The canvases are built from four joined boards, a structural choice that preserves the visible seam while unifying the surface into a single field. The support becomes what she calls a portal of air, an opening through which the viewer is invited to cross into other states of awareness. Light, in her practice, is never incidental. Its micro-reflections across the painted surface generate quiet iridescences: colour that does not impose itself but reveals itself, slowly, depending on where you stand. Refraction as a cognitive condition: the same logic that bends light through matter bends consciousness through experience.

My Most Purest Form, Love does not conclude Manzino's inquiry but reveals its foundation. Love, here, is not sentiment. It is substance: the force that runs through all things, the essence that connects self to world, individual to universal. A concept rooted in philosophical tradition and in a pantheistic vision of existence that everything shares the same underlying nature, and that nature is not matter, it is presence. This is where the alchemical logic of her practice becomes fully legible. The inner search, the ancestral references, the chromatic tools, the collective act of witnessing: all of it moves toward this recognition.