Ernesto Benítez site-specific installation art contemporary artist Contemporary cuban art and Contemporary art cuban art and Arte Contemporáneo Ernesto Benítez arte cubano contemporáneo

Ernesto Benítez, Contemporary Art

Ernesto Benitez, Spain based contemporary Cuban artist, whose aesthetic is characterized by multidisciplinarity, experimentation and a deep conceptual projection. With his artistic praxis he explores different edges of the subjective, the political, the social and the cultural to propose unavoidable reflections and ontological questionings that insist on the restorative or therapeutic function of the art processes. As a son of the digital era and heir to contemporary hedonism and ludism, Ernesto is committed to an artistic discourse that assumes our own weaknesses, the splits and fractures of all kinds that result from our existential experience emphasizing in an irrepressible need for religare.

In his varied artistic production we can find drawings, collages, photography (analog and digital), “paintings” made with layers of different materials superimposed on various supports; sculptures, manipulated objects as well as large art installations presented as environmental art (for specific sites) in which traditional materials (salt, ash, coal or clay, among many others) are contrasted with elements of the New-Media (Streaming transmissions via Internet, sound incorporated through sensors or, 3D Animation and system programming); performances, clandestine interventions or video-art projected on diverse supports (including over the public itself). Benítez is a committed contemporary Cuban artist who has always employed in his artistic practice a varied range of manifestations, processes, techniques and materials, articulated from a conceptual discourse, as a counterpoint to the synaesthetic statements and instrumentalism of much of the art made today in this unstructured construct that we use to call Globalization. His is a vision that overflows and questions the subjet´s fragmented intimacy in order to scrutinize the depths of an “I” always in relation to the other and to its environment… A deeply reflective proposal that is articulated at the crossroads of the self but focused from the spheres and spaces of mediation.

Visual Arts: Analogy and Symbolic Speech
(Art, Anthropology and Philosophy)

With a deep philosophical-anthropological vocation, the work of Ernesto Benítez intends -if possible- to revalue the analogical thought and to resignify the symbolic speech that the post-industrial societies have kidnapped and tied up emptying it of all transcendental connotation. Confronting (obviously or hermetically) the rites, fetishes and liturgies characteristic of the dystopian Eurocentric modernity with different discursive elements emanated from other practices and ancestral rituals, whose epistemological bases extend beyond immanentism, Ernesto Benítez proposes a reformulation of the concept of globalization, increasingly in need of bidirectionality.

Contemporary Art Events

XIII Havana Biennial: Ab æternō (Exhibition Opening by Ernesto Benítez) contemporary art visual art Ab æternō (XIII Bienal de La Habana) Exposición Colateral Arte Cubano arte Contemporáneo artes visuales

XIII Havana Biennial: Ab æternō (Opening by Ernesto Benítez)

Contemporary Art News

Exhibition in Cuba shows inflated garbage bags as 'identity stripping', Exposición en Cuba muestra bolsas de basura infladas como ´despojo de la identidad´, La MegaNota

Exhibition in Cuba shows inflated garbage bags as ‘identity stripping’, La MegaNota

Normalization and hegemony of the Western cultural model

With diverse materials, many times derived from fire and its action of destruction-renewal -in a frank allusion to the influence of alchemical thought and its hermetic discourse-, the work of Ernesto Benitez explores and reflects on the wounds caused by the hegemony of Western cultural models. His proposal could be summarized, in his own words: “as an exercise in self-discovery, self-recovery or reconquest” and is destined to fill the gaps that are generated in the post-art world today.

Ernesto Benítez Arte y Antropología Cultural Arte Espacio Específico o Specific Site, Instalaciones Arte Environment-al. SaMsara (New Media Art) Arte Digital arte contemporáneo arte cubano contemporáneo con real time clock calendar

Contemporary Cuban Artist

That restorative function that had previously been evident in our artistic production in a Bedia or a Juan Francisco Elso, but in a dimension closer to an African or Latin American imaginary, assumes in Ernesto universal identity elements.

(Dr. Ramón Cabrera Salort)

“Between Fire and Stones, The River of Life”

“(…) Benítez is interested in critical formulations from the historical fiction of art, thus reporting on the condition of all culture and its conceptions of political relations and expressing a notion of history condemned to the fiction of its events (…) Strategically, Benítez instruments an ironic affirmation of the situation of his artistic condition as the self-affirmation of artistic pragmatism, as a necessary suspension of the expansive character of a way of making art within society (…)”

Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz

(Leverhulme Distinguished Professor. St Anthony’s College, Oxford University)

“(…) Ernesto Benítez has studied Alchemy, and this allows him to access a not free knowledge of things, materials and symbols. If he has not started to experiment it is because reagents are scarce or because he lacks the time, but the search tempts him. Instead, he experiments with what he knows and, in his workshop-laboratory, he plays at obtaining the philosopher’s stone or the purest gold. He invents reactions, mixes everything within his reach and with that “sacred potion” he smears the fixed symbol (body, knife, skull, book) to inject life “outside the established system”, to turn it into a metaphor (…)”

Elvis Fuentes

(Associate curator, El Museo del Barrio)

“(…) This philosophical and gnoseological dimension of Ernesto’s work is supported by other multiple dimensions that his pieces propose both in ethical and aesthetic aspects (…) a regenerative poetics where the permanent antinomies of Ernesto are the subterfuge and the pretext for the infinite exploration in the human essences from the mysteries of the telluric and the paradoxes of the own existence (…)”

Yolanda Wood

(Art critic. Dean of the Faculty of Art History of the University of Havana)

“(…) Although he was a member of the group Arte Calle -one of the significant artistic-social projects of the eighties in Cuba- Benítez is part of the promotion of creators of the mid-nineties (…) Ernesto Benítez focuses the theme of his work on a constant and deliberate search to understand the human condition. Ontological concerns have become his main obsession, heavy burdens for the mind and body (…)”