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The encounter with art always brings new knowledge. The artist’s creative process features different stages that come one after the other and result from each other to finally develop in parallel. In particular, in Benassi’s work it is easy to identify three major trends which comprehensively illustrate the foundations of his poetics. It isnecessary, therefore, to describe them to the benefit of those who not only want to understand his painting, butalso use it as a means to personally know the soul of its creator. The first stage, highly experimental, is what Benassi himself calls ‘material’. Throughout it, we observe an eclectic work, composed of heterogeneous materials, gathered with different techniques in monochromatic assemblage works. The lack of chromatic abundance serves as a counterbalance to the saturation of materials. This creative attitude already reveals a global and unlimitedvision of phenomenalism, seen only as a ‘poetic alibi’ for an activity which is per se far from the empirical and from now on dedicated to the transcendent. The desire to narrate the latter, without the logical decontextualizing detachment from reality, shows the artist’s concern to provide an immediately intelligible form of art from the perceptual point of view, but also engaging and touching on the sensory side. The focus on pure and essentialnatural beauty allows the artist to build an increasingly meditative discourse. The blades of grass caressed by the wind and the arabesques of thorns are almost calligraphic elements which reveal an interest in the shu, the comprehensive Japanese term encompassing writing, painting, dance and music in one single creative act, onesingle ‘path’ which, through technical optimization, leads to an inner refinement of the individual. Currently, SauroBenassi is going through the most aniconic phase of his work, also called Darshan. The darshan, according to the  Sanskrit notion, is the last sacred bastion of a physical sense that has lost much of its magic. The darshan is the kind of eye contact one establishes when saying ‘I want to see this in person’ or when telling one’s friends ‘I was there and I saw it’. The moment when the sacred becomes tangible is expressed by the artist through his chromaticand material experimentation focused on the production of such a harmonic vision that it becomes mesmerizing tothe observing eye.