About the Artist
Francesco Grigori Di Bene is a photographer and filmmaker based in Rome. His work explores the intersection of identity, time, and generational legacy—always seeking the fragile point where image becomes memory, and memory becomes emotion.
His style is rooted in authenticity: raw light, intimate frames, and a narrative approach that privileges imperfection over aesthetics. In over a decade of visual storytelling, Francesco has collaborated with communication agencies, private clients, and cultural institutions, always blending documentary instincts with poetic intuition.
His most personal project, Chronogenics, was born from a period of deep personal questioning—after reconnecting with his father following fifteen years of silence, and confronting for the first time the desire to become a father himself. Through the visual blending of parents and children, Chronogenics investigates what remains of us in others, and what we carry, unknowingly, from those who came before.
In May 2025, Chronogenics was exhibited in Rome, accompanied by a personal speech delivered at the vernissage and later featured on Juliet Art Magazine. In it, Francesco reflected on how art, however powerful, is ultimately inert—while the fragments of DNA we pass on may persist as long as humanity itself.
“Art may be grand. But it is inanimate. After centuries, even the greatest works fade. A child, however, carries within them the code of our presence. A molecule of eternity, scattered into the future.”
— from the exhibition speech, 2025
— from the exhibition speech, 2025
Curatorial Text by Grazia Mocci
Chronogenics is a photographic investigation that focuses on the face as a genetic and spiritual archive, as a surface of transition between what we will become and what we have been. Through a range of black and white portraits, the artist stages a silent dialogue between generations—between fathers, mothers, and children who mirror one another, sometimes visibly, sometimes in a mysterious and hidden way, as if a subtle line connects the most elusive features of identity.
Chronogenics was born from a deep necessity: to leave a trace of oneself in the world. If the creative impulse is a surrogate for the need to procreate, here the images search for resemblance, evoke it, even where it is invisible—constructing an emotional geography made of eyes, lines, gestures, and shared memories. A legacy not only biological but symbolic.
The choice of black and white responds to a precise formal and conceptual intention: the absence of color acts as a tool of subtraction, forcing the viewer to concentrate on structure, symmetry, and discrepancy. Form thus emerges clearly, and the medium becomes a vehicle of truth—the image approaching essence, like a snapshot that remains as time erodes.
The series revolves around the idea of resemblance—not only as morphology, but as a visual tension between presence and absence. The images work through fusion, juxtaposition, or hybridization of somatic traits, highlighting both manifest and imperceptible convergences, suggesting a reflection on genetic transmission as a visual narrative through time.
The exhibition does not merely showcase—it invites us to ask: what do we really leave behind? What traces endure against the erosive force of time and memory? Photography here does not document—it interprets. It becomes a form of creation, and like a child, each image is born from a desire for continuity, from a will to remain.
Chronogenics is, at its core, an archive of bonds—a sharp reflection on identity as both gift and destiny, on being in time and through time. And on the beauty of belonging to a narrative that precedes and surpasses us.
