Contemporary Art Publishings: Articles, Essays, Interviews Publication

Ernesto Benítez: regurgitator of discomfort

By Yenny Hernández Valdés
The work of artist Ernesto Benitez (Havana, 1971) requires a pause, a meditative moment in the midst of the vortex of the contemporary world to approach it. It is worth saying that Benitez has never been too academic or institutional. He is an artist who shuns the pamphletary and the honeyed and insipid speeches. Certainly, his work has tried to evade, given the uncomfortable nature that characterizes him, the classificatory interstices of “great art”…

Ernesto Benítez: exhumation of the breath

By Antonio Correa Iglesias
While there is a visual production that, being Cuban and contemporary, is anchored in technical automatism, in the glossy patina, in the recurrent figuration, in the empty image, in an anxiety to monetize rather than to create something truly new, there is another one that consolidates its processes of inquiry with the sole objective of finding that which constitutes us ontologically. The elusive question for ontology catalyzes here a nature in terms of inquiry, once it does not pursue an attitude as vindication…

Ernesto Benítez: The most rebellious of them all

By Abram Bravo Guerra
Adjusted to the keys of a past and present with its own dramas, the Cuban visual narrative has cleverly played with the reinvention of processes, styles, discourses, even worn-out speeches. It seems to me a perfectly natural path in a context for which moving at the wrong time has been, more than a matter of regret, a safe bet to take things with a certain reflective distance… However, what about the reflective dissent from Cuban art?…

Ernesto Benítez’s ‘Leviathan’: a necessary monster?

By Arianna Covas Alemán
From irreverence and satire, Benitez enunciates his theses, of great tropological density and solid conceptual foundation. His artistic proposals are the tip of the iceberg of a whole research process in which philosophical, socio-historical and anthropological knowledge are interconnected. Thus, approaching his work is an intellectual exercise in which any interpretative naivety is discarded. There is nothing puerile and fortuitous in his creative work, but rather a skein of signifiers that the receiver must…

Ernesto Benítez and ‘The Abode of Leviathan’

by Yenny Hernández Valdés
Let us briefly review Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the importance that for her the philosophical postulate of “humanity” has taken on for current generations, inasmuch as it has become an urgent reality due, among other issues, to the impact that the West has had on the rest of the world, not only because of an evident saturation of its products and technological development, but also because it has “exported” its recipe on the construction of the nation-state as the only possible form of government…

Ernesto Benítez returns to Havana with the installation ‘LEVIATHAN’.

By EDGAR ARIEL
Leviathan is the title of the exhibition with which Cuban painter, draftsman and installation artist Ernesto Benitez (Havana, 1971) returns to Havana since his last presentation there in 2019. The exhibition can be seen from January 13 until January 17 at the Zambrano Hall of the Hispano-American Cultural Center, located at 17 Malecon Avenue, between Prado and Capdevila, Old Havana…

‘RESET WORK’: Cuban artist Ernesto Benitez exhibits in Palma de Mallorca, Spain

By RIALTA STAFF
Cuban painter, draftsman and installation artist Ernesto Benitez (Havana, 1971) exhibits in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, his most recent work, gathered under the title Reset Work. The show, inaugurated on Sept. 15 as part of the Nit de l’Art 2022 festival, will be on view through mid-November at the Mallorca Progress Society. The Nit de l’Art 2022 in Palma was organized by the Art Palma Contemporari gallery association. This year the event reached its

Ernesto Benítez, an irrepressible need for religare

By Eduardo Albert Santos
Ernesto Benítez’s artistic production has gradually become oriented toward a particularly topical issue. In the present circumstances, the collapse of existence drawn in terms of coherence, stability, confidence in the future, leads to the image of the broken and fragmented human being, dislocated with himself and his environment, doubtful of his own subjectivity, which he fears or in which he is consumed without a pertinent way out.

Introspicere: seven days of pilgrimage

By Claudia Placeres Gómez
The creative pilgrimage, introspection and silence of Ernesto Benítez during the last seven years are translated into the rebirth of his work, which is sustained in the rigorous decantation of the precepts that have rightly defined him and the values that will compel him in the future. A stop along the way to revisit and dialogue with himself, to question his aesthetic discourse and to reinsert himself, taking advantage of the context of the XIII Havana Biennial, in an environment that, although distant at times, will never be alien to him..

XIII Havana Biennial: Ernesto Benitez exhibits his Open Studio

By: Artcónica Team
After a long period of time away from the national exhibition scene, Cuban painter, draftsman and installation artist Ernesto Benitez returned to the island to inaugurate the exhibition Ab æternō, in his Open studio, taking advantage of the context of international visibility offered by the XIII Havana Biennial. Numerous friends, artists, art critics and curators, interested in reconnecting with the creator and assessing the trajectory of his visual production in recent years, have attended the space -eventually located in the Vedado…

An Irrepressible Need for Religare

By Ernesto Benítez
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-…

Within Fire and Stones: The River of Life

By Ramon Cabrera Salort
The creative adventure of Ernesto Benítez, (1971), started its present discursive coherence at his personal exhibition El ejercicio de la sospecha, (The Exercise of Suspicion), in 1996, when some symbols and issues about man and his becoming, from a mystic and alchemistic slant bound to the anthropological, appeared at the exhibition at the L Gallery, when Benítez was still an undergraduate at the Instituto Superior de Arte (Higher Institute of the Arts)…

Ernesto Benitez: Philanthropy

By Lida L. Sigas
Ernesto Benítez gives to us a least part well-known of its production, the exhibition will be from September 10 in gallery La Casona. In this occasion the exhibition will be composed only by drawings. This manifestation, although recurrent in spite of his inquire into other supports, it rarely appears in an exclusive way in his show. His immediacy provides now to him the dose of necessary truthfulness to make model that it obsesses him everyday. The natural decontextual…

DIG (with Dylan, Kansas & Benitez)

By: frency
Since approximately 1997 or 1998 we have been feeling a process of minimalization in the production of visual Art that has been in accordance with certain reactions to the cultural excesses of identity order characteristic of a part of Cuban Art since the end of the eighties and during a good part of the nineties. This “saying” more with less, looking for moderation in order to strip ourselves of unnecessary elements in the expressive sense…

Death in the River of Life

By: Ramón Cabrera Salort
Ernesto Benitez is a young artist who since the mid-1990s has been building a solid visual proposal based on human ontological concerns of universal bias -the spiritual, the material, life, death. Since his exhibition “The Light of the Body” in 1998, he began a poetics centered on the alchemical, on the artist as shaman and materials such as charcoal, ash, salt, wood and iron, or photography as a transmutative procedure, among others, have constituted components of the configuration of his proposals…

Ernesto Benitez: The Journey, the Light and the Truth

By: Inti Atanasio Yanes
“Not without regret does one abandon, once discovered, the place of origin”.
(Hörderlin)
In his research on the “origin of the work of art”, Martin Heidegger develops one of the fundamental ideas of his aesthetic thought and legacy: “The origin of the work of art is art: that is, art is in its essence an origin, a characteristic way in which truth is brought to the entities, becomes a historical event”.This conception encloses a specific way of apprehending the essence of the artistic beyond any “external” criteria…

Borderline, A Radiography of the Contemporary Subject

By: Piter Ortega Núñez
“The self-alienation of the human being has reached such a degree that it allows him to live his own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment of the first order”. This famous Benjaminian sentence, expounded in his anthological text “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility”, was the first idea that came to my mind as I toured Ernesto Benitez Borderline, a solo show at the Villa Manuela Gallery of the UNEAC from May to June 2006…

Findings

By Elvia Rosa Castro
Nobody is perhaps aware of the fact that Nicholas Flamel, the famous French alchemist who affirms having discovered the Philosophal Stone in 1382, kept a manuscript, at the time of his death, revealing the antecedents of his alchemist practices as well as those of his book Hieroglyphica. Flamel, wise man who could even read Latin, had received from his wife Perenela -not a clue of where she found it- a piece of work titled De Veritate… I do know something about its origins though…

In Search of the Sixth Sense

By Darys J. Vázquez Aguiar
Ernesto Benítez is focused on a constant and deliberate quest to understand the human condition through his art. His main obsession has become a serious ontological exploration, of the mind and the body. Thus, in his most recent project, One and a Thousand Eyes, Benítez seeks to decipher existential and cosmological secrets through an interior monologue. The daily exercise of self-reflection transforms the artist into a monk of his own practice, and his creative method into a ritual.

…if those behind run well

By: Ivonnett Arcia Zamora
An aspect of Cuban plastic arts production developed in the eighties, taking advantage of the interdisciplinarity established by post-modernity and, consequently, the expansion of art into fields considered by tradition as “extra-artistic”, based its reflections on man in anthropology. Thus, introspective research was supported by the epistemic, methodological and practical principles of this knowledge. The artistic proposals became disturbing inquiries into the nature of man, the complexity of his processes of signification and the structures of social and cultural interaction…

Alchemy Dictions: The work of Ernesto Benitez

By: Elvis Fuentes
Ernesto Benitez is a young artist in the Cuban plastic panorama. Although his experience can be traced back to his participation in a mythical group of the 1980s (art-street), his recent work has hardly any visible relation with the kind of practices that encouraged him then. The social vein is minimal, except for paying the essential quota of art as a product of a specific context…

Cardinal Points: Cartography of the Self

By: Ernesto Benítez
Every man, by the very fact of being a man, is open to the other, the unknown and transcendent, whether it is understood as the divine, a divinity, a simple capacity of projection or whatever; it is an anthropological trait that defines him. This effort to understand his human condition; this natural curiosity, as Aristotle already assumed, All men desire by nature to know, drags him to the “eternal question”. Well then, from that conscious openness to which our own existence exposes us; from that interaction with the world through my own…

Ernesto Benitez, Penetrating the Image

By: Ramon Cabrera Salort
(About two exhibitions of Ernesto Benitez)
Lezama Lima in his “Prelude to the Imaginary Eras” alludes to Roger Bacon and his experimenti sortes and of such luck, of such sortilege, causality as surprise, the experience of chance. Thus comes to us a causality of invisible, non-successive links. This causality manifests its evidences in the work of young artist Ernesto Benitez, recently exhibited in two Havana galleries in a sortilegio happening: “El dolor es la vida”, at the Luz y Oficios gallery, in May, and “En el camino”, at the gallery of the magazine Revolucion y Cultura…

Images of a journey

By: Ramón Cabrera Salort
Ernesto Benitez has started a journey, from his exhibition “The light of the body” that refers directly to the title of one of his works in this exhibition: in trying to unveil the mystery of living. He intends the artist to recover the spells of the officiant, of the one who communicates with the invisible forces and at the end reveals which is the path to follow. Once on the road, in life, walking, living: work. The work also manifests itself as being and in this work and in this being, the artist finds the way of God…

Ernesto Benítez’ antinomies

By Yolanda Wood
Contradictions are essential in the old history of antinomies. A concept that refers us to Greece in the times of the great thinkers and to the logic of understandings and knowledges that ignored the great significance of the counterposed judgements. Ernesto Benítez’ recent work is not unaware of any of these theses; rather than that -age apart– he takes possession of them as a necessary way of transit for the rediscovery of the truth from ourselves…

The Light of the Body

By Inti Yanes-Fernández
In the beginning it is not Art, but Existence as pure intentionality of externalization. To open up, to ek-stasiarse, presupposes the unfolding of a form that makes evident an interiority at first veiled, not before the eyes. This interiority contains a fundamental richness that is not actualized-it remains in the absent state of possibility-if it does not become for itself in the very act of projecting itself towards “its” outside. Only that which is self-absorbed can ek-stasize itself, that ante in whose onticity the opening of itself in self-consciousness has already been presupposed…

Small Fragments Of Truth

By Rito Ramón Aroche.
Poetics?
Motivated by the history of our infinite question about the why -of our existence- and starting from the conceptual principle that the true mystery is life itself -and after a personal accident that made me reconsider my role and my objectives and interests as an individual and redefine my expressive needs- I have assumed some years ago an expansion of the frontiers of art towards terrains proper of philosophy and gnoseology in a general sense…

Marks of Indifference

By: Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz
The doubt in the work of Ernesto Benitez presents the extension of the artistic space in relation to the specific mechanisms of exclusion and respect of the discourse instrumented from the constant suspicion of the exercise of knowledge. Benítez is interested in the critical formulations from the historical fiction of art, reporting thus, on the condition of all culture and its conceptions of political and expressive relations of a notion of history condemned to the fiction of its events…

The Guantanamera by Ernesto Benitez

By: Ismael Gonzáles Castañer
Location
Popular music is our true representation before the world, not literature or art; “No se puede tapar/ el sol con un dedo/ la verdá(d) es la verdá(d) / mala-cara no quiero”, by N(new) G(generation) the Band, inaugurates the Cuba not only aesthetic of the 90’s…

The paintings of E.B.

By Rito Ramón Aroche
That. Writing as a sign of deterioration… Painting. Paint that drips or stains – and doesn’t mirror. Already – not – mirrors. The writing (…) And there are some thickening, strata. Inclinations. E. B. says -he says us- and scribbles. He knows, or-does-not-know, that articulates. I remember Camus:<...we must break the fixed games of the mirror...>> That. A pantry that delimits a trace, a face -a Christ?- a certain telurgy…

Triangular Space: A Challenge to Absences…

By Omar Pascual Castillo
Interesting. It turns out to be interesting to meet up here, at the beginning of a text when attempting to treat a theme like THE CUBAN NATIONAL IDENTITY. This time, as plastic speech or, to be more exact, as aesthetic philosophem of painting and installative art potentiated by what is known to be the most knowledgeable in interpretative and histographic matters within the artistic world such as…

“Vogue” For the Love of Art. Ernesto Benítez (Paintings)

By: Marlen Arrébola and Licet González.
Let there be no more talk of this absurd maxim: we need new things, we have to adapt to the times, everything changes, everything is changing, everything is changing, perhaps nature is changing, the light and the air are changing, the passions of the human heart have changed since the times of Homer? We have to adapt to the times: but what if my times are in error, because my neighbor does wrong, I am obliged to do it too, because they have a false idea of virtue?

Ernesto Benitez: Conjugating Pop

By: Toni Piñera
A piece of pottery, any stone with the mark of an ornament, or a vestige of an ancient civilization, can be the object of a true cult by modern man. And if he is an artist, he questions the past as he was never questioned, in an effort to know better our roots, to know better where we came from? The current work of the young painter, draftsman and engraver Ernesto Benítez (Havana, 1971), which he recently exhibited at the Wifredo Lam Gallery…

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