By Ernesto Benítez
In the 1990’s and 2000’s my work goes through different stages of research on existence and the phenomenon of perception linked to a deep ontological concern for the individual (the self) always in relation to the environment and the other. During this period I constantly explore the blurred line that separates the real and the virtual in cyberculture in order to propose an instrumental spirituality as a salvation plank against the suffocating dictatorship of globalized postmodern individualism and the extreme enlightenment rationality inherited from modernity.
During the first decade of the century, in accordance with those conceptual assumptions, I continue to explore the narrow springs and zigzagging edges of a transvestite spirituality and an atomized individual; I continue to use the same processes -as if it were an Egyptian mummification liturgy-, the same symbolic structures in my discourse and practically the same materials derived from the action of fire as an agent of destruction-renewal (ashes of philosophical or other texts, charcoal, clay, salt, etc.), but from the year 2010 until the year 2010, I have been using the same processes as if it were an Egyptian liturgy of mummification. ), but since 2010 until today, after almost a decade residing in Europe, my artistic praxis experiences a turning point opening to three lines of research -sometimes parallel, sometimes interrelated- that move around: globalization and biased identity, fragmented memory and/or kidnapped spirituality, as evident dystopian features of this post-individual liquid era characterized by a constant struggle to shape and control information flows and/or monopolize its distribution-dissemination channels.
From the project “Seven Days of Silence” (which covers a period of seven years: 2011-2018 and includes numerous series of works) I give continuity, as an existential testimony, to that exploration around the hybridization of the identity principle in the West but with a line of research that places special emphasis no longer on the complementary ambivalences and antinomies, but on the concept of splitting as a Cultural Wound -in the social- and Psychological -in the personal-.
Starting from the inevitable condition of immigrant, my experience of interaction with the market culture and its tautological mentality of accumulation and serialization will be filtered through -and making more and more room for- the influence of my cultural foundations or bases (perhaps genetic) as substrates of a non-Western (or non-orthodox Western) thought in the most spiritual sense. With a discourse of symbolic openness to the infinity of all possible in an attempt to religare in anthropological terms (especially psychological, social and cultural), my aesthetic proposal intends, since then, -like alchemy in its time- to channel, if this were possible, those systems or liturgical practices derived from the processes of art itself as tools of self-recovery, or self-discovery, in a globalized and excludingly polarized, fragmented, split world.
Taking technological development as the main exponent of Cartesian rationality, this line of research focuses, in the first instance, on a constant exploration of the history of Western dualistic thought (and its marked exclusionary character) as cultural genes that govern the extreme contemporary categorical polarization and the fractures of all kinds that derive from it: splits and fractures in the social, cultural, political, scientific-technological and individual spheres; but above all I am inclined to explore the splits or amputations of the individual in the emotional sphere. In this sense, many of my proposals are born and nourished by small life stories marginalized or outlawed by Official History. See the projects related to suicide or those emanating from the social stigmatization of schizophrenia or other related issues.
But it is not the split (Cultural Wound) as a mere perception of a binary or polarized reality (lacking complementarity) that motivates me to enunciate the questions that I wield with my artistic praxis, but the power relations that underlie silent and crouched in the bosom of this dualistic model of thought, in which the flags of colonialism once waved and in which today the logic of domination is constructed and globalized (meaning of nature, gender and a long etcetera of super and sub-alterities). So many of my most pressing concerns derive, then, in a constant questioning or scrutiny of Cartesian rhetoric (“Cultural Wound” itself) as the ABSOLUTE theoretical configuration framework with which we usually filter human experiences in this part of the hemisphere.
In short, for several years my entire proposal has been marked by an openness (processual, aesthetic and conceptual) to the analogical thinking of mystical traditions (alchemy, Christian mysticism, Zen philosophy…) that I oppose to the “new postmodern spirituality” and all its liturgical paraphernalia associated with the market and the multitasking of the digital ecosystem. Using its own technological tools, I seek an approach without complicity that leads to constant questioning and questions the quasi-dystopian values of an In-Door culture that is characterized by ubiquity (not immediacy) and subdues us to the point of unconsciousness by immersing us in the algorithms of a virtuality in which, in no case, real links are generated, but with which we can fill the hollowness of any kind of lack.
From the formal point of view I produce my work in multiple media: digital (with NetArt proposals that move on the thin line between virtual and real, etc.), “painting” in mixed media, installations that try to exploit the space in which they are shown (Specific Site), drawing, collage, video, photography and other media. The materials, many of them derived from fire -as I have already mentioned- and its direct action (on containers of Official History, knowledge or knowledge in the West) and the processes used are especially aimed at digging into that cultural wound; so that, like Heraclitus, today more than ever, I believe that my work could be summarized in very brief words: I have sought myself to understand and humanize my relationship with the other and with the environment.