Sculpture and Artistic Installation Artworks (Selection). The effect derived from the interaction of the public with the artworks, as well as the concepts of time and space are some of the most important discursive elements in the poetics and in the investigations and reflections that Ernesto Benítez proposes with his artistic praxis. It is not strange, then, that he often turns to sculpture and artistic installation as expressive resources of great weight in his most experimental proposals…
Drawing Artworks (Selection). It is curious that drawing in Ernesto Benitez’s work is not relegated to a secondary role, as is often the case with other contemporary artists. On the contrary: far from the connotations that drawing acquired during the Renaissance and far from assuming the values that modernism granted it later…
Painting Artworks (Selection). The painting in Ernesto Benitez’s work is presented, formally, with a wide spectrum of materials, supports and styles always in the field of exploration and experimentation. Prioritizing the ideas he discusses and the theses he proposes in his work, from a very young age Ernesto assumes a way of relating to painting, expanding its borders to the point of proposing pictorial installation sites…
Photography Artworks (Selection). In the contemporary art scene, photography has a decisive weight. Perhaps because of its own nature and the susceptibility of recreating the reallity-other or misleading realities, many artists turn to photography as a means of expression to dialogue about time… or, like Ernesto Benitez, about ubiquity (omnipresence), about the non-places and otherness (self-reference) loaded with “encrypted” information…
New Media -Digital Artworks- Selection. Cyberculture -which is not at all a Culture of Knowledge, as some pretend to make us believe today-, in terms of communication has brought with it what Ernesto Benitez calls the overflow of fields (which does not expand), that is, an invasion, more than an interconnection; a constant filtration towards new territories that concern the technological sciences and that, in contemporary art, we usually call Art of the New Media or, Digital Art…
Ephemeral Artworks (Selection). For Ernesto Benitez, contemporary art is closely related to the ephemeral. The ephemeral allows him to investigate the timelessness and transitory nature of impermanence, or the phenomenon of “ubiquity”. Ernesto Benítez appeals to ephemeral art to question the perennial expiration and obsolescence of the instant in post-modern contemporaneity, where, once the modernist Line of Progress and Eliade’s Primordial Time have been overcome, the subject renounces all temporal hold to immerse him/herself in a chronotope (Bajtín) that privileges space to the detriment of time…
Collage and Assemblage Artworks (Selection). When Ernesto Benítez appeals to an artistic praxis that privileges collage, assemblage and includes found objects in his work; when he appeals to tautological reiteration, the accumulation or juxtaposition of elements of diverse origin in the same space, on the same support, he is evidently alluding to the commodification of modern man in the market era. And it does so by questioning the way in which we contemporaries relate to the object of consumption…
Graphic Artworks (Selection). The artistic engraving -the multiple or serial graphic work-, in many occasions has been considered as a minor work in the context of contemporary art. Ernesto Benítez specialized in this artistic manifestation, so he knows first-hand the capacity for innovation and experimentation that artistic engraving offers: lithography, intaglio, woodcut, silk-screen printing, collography…
Ernesto Benitez’s video production (as well as his interventions) is always conceived as an experimental act. So, the denomination of “action video” would be more in line with his proposal of video art. The artist puts special emphasis on the study of the digital panopticon society and the culture of decadence in his audiovisual materials. In them Benitez intertwines, with different discursive levels, reflections and questionings of political, social, cultural and spiritual order. Below you will be able to consult and enjoy some of his works made in video-art…
Performance and Interventions (Selection). Ernesto Benítez conceives his performances -like his whole work- and his interventions in the first instance to disagree or dissent… to raise awareness, to point out or call attention and to establish the bases that raise polemics around different questionings that in his poetics are interwoven from the political, social, cultural and existential. In his interventions Ernesto does not propose any exercise of salvation or redemption… From his interventions (clandestine or not) and his performative or performatic gestures, Ernesto Benítez limits himself to questioning and scrutinizing…