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…
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…
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 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…
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 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…
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: 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…
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…
