Twelve years after its presentation at CENCREM (in the context of the 10th Havana Biennial), Samsara, a multimedia environmental installation (environmental art) that Ernesto Benítez designed as a site specific art installation in 2009, continues to be included in Cuban contemporary art projects.
As you know, Ernesto Benítez is a multidisciplinary visual artist with a strong conceptual and experimental projection. His artistic praxis explores different aspects of the political, social and cultural to propose unavoidable reflections or ontological questions that explore the restorative and therapeutic function of the creative processes of art.
As a child of the digital era and heir to contemporary hedonism and Luddism, Ernesto is committed to an artistic discourse that assumes our own weaknesses, as well as the scission and fractures of all kinds that result from our existential experience in order to emphasise an irrepressible need for religare.
With a profound philosophical-anthropological vocation, Ernesto Benítez’s work proposes to revalue analogical thought and re-signify the symbolic discourse that post-industrial societies have emptied of any transcendental connotation. By confronting the rites, fetishes and liturgies of the quasi-dystopian and Eurocentric modernity with discursive logics that emanate from ancestral practices and rituals (derived from Zen Buddhism, alchemy, syncretic Caribbean cults or Christian mysticism), whose epistemological bases extend beyond immanentism, Ernesto Benítez proposes a reformulation of the concept of globalisation, increasingly in need of bi-directionality.