Havana, Jan 13 (EFE) – Cuban artist Ernesto Benitez premiered this Friday at the Hispano-American Center of Culture the work “Leviathan”, an exhibition consisting of a pile of inflated garbage bags, which allude to the person “stripped of identity”.
The piece, which will be on display until February 7, is also a reference to authoritarianisms “from the personal” to “governments”, but, above all, to the “dispensability” of the “subject, uniform collectivism and the Machiavellian anonymity of the hypnotized mob”, as Benitez explained to EFE.
The author -based in Spain- adds with “Leviathan” his second personal exhibition in Cuba during the last ten years and said he expects to make a similar one “soon” in Spain.
The exhibition also alludes to how the subjects in today’s society are “disposable” and, at the end of the day, it is also about a person “ignored” in the masses.
Likewise, according to the information that accompanies the work in the center -in front of the iconic Havana Malecon- it refers “directly to the hegemonic neoliberal ‘mátrix’, mediated by the sacrosanct technology, the implacable influence and the real power of the market”.
The artist Ernesto Benítez -professor of Art and Anthropology– was invited by the plastic artist, designer and professor Liván Padilla to share a classroom teaching at the ISDi (Instituto Superior de Diseño) in Havana. In the first class of the course, both professors talked about the techniques of handmade printing (Xylography, Intaglio, Lithography…) techniques used in artistic engraving. As part of the didactic material, tools, instruments, supports and linographic prints in dry and one ink were presented.
On January 26th, after more than 30 years of graduating from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 1990 and at the initiative of Professor Liván, both artists joined forces for the first time in an interesting pedagogical project. A kind of collaboration that, although nothing concrete is being handled in this regard, “I would like to extend it, even to art galleries,” said Benitez.
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.
Ernesto Benítez (Open Studio) Collateral/Side Exhibition to XIII Havana Biennial.
After a long time away from the national exhibition scene, Cuban painter, draftsman and installation artist Ernesto Benítez returned to the island to inaugurate the exhibition Ab æternō, in his Open Studio, in the context of international visibility offered by the XIII Havana Biennial.
The gallery space -eventually located in Vedado- has been attended by numerous friends, artists, art critics and curators, interested in re-contacting the creator and assessing the trajectory of his visual production in recent years.
Interviewed by the specialist Claudia Placeres (member of the Artcrónica team), about the circumstances of his return to the country and his specific link to the scene of the Havana Biennial, the artist stated: (…) I can assure you that in these seven years my work, which starts from reflections and explorations around: globalization and biased identity, fragmented memory and hijacked spirituality, as evident dystopian features of this liquid post-individual era, fits perfectly with the argumentative concerns that initially governed the artistic call, even though my presentation has been on the fringes of the official collaterals of this Biennial. However, in relation to the coherence with those assumptions, what I have not yet fully understood is how this new conception of the Biennial could be sustained -in general- under the umbrella of its own slogan: The construction of the possible. I have heard it said that this is a biennial of resistance, a biennial of integration, etc… but the truth is that, in my modest opinion, the final result shows, in the first instance, an evident fragmentation, diverse fractures and disintegration.
