Category: Catalogs

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)…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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?