Upcoming Exhibitions & Art-Shows
Theatrum Spagyricum, Flassaders Cultural Centre (Palma de Mallorca, Spain)
Theatrum Spagyricum (Mental Exercise)
Personal exhibition. Flassaders Centre, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. September-October.
An exploration of the three fundamental pillars of Western civilization; namely: Greek Democracy, Roman Law and Christianity. Installations made of mass wine, salt, ashes, lighting and sound.
Request more information about this project from here.
Exhibitions (Shows & Series)
2023, The Lethargy of the Gods (Netless Tightrope). Center for Development of Visual Arts-CDAV
The Lethargy of the Gods (Netless Tightrope)
Personal exhibition. Center for the Development of Visual Arts (CDAV), Havana.
June 14 to July 27, 2023. Immersive Multimedia Art Installations made with digital programming for Arduino UNO, RTC devices of 7-segment led screens, sound editing, fiber and paper pulp (historical and political texts, scientific and philosophical clippings) and personal documents.
2023, Leviathan. Hispano-American Center of Culture. Havana
Power without authority & authoritarianism…
Degradable ephemeral installation made with inflated garbage bags…
Personal Exhibition shown in one of the most emblematic spaces of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, Cuba.
January 13 to February 17, 2023.
2022-Reset Work (Nit de l´Art) Palma de Mallorca
Art as an ethical commitment…
Personal Exhibition (Nit de l’Art 2022), at Mallorca Progress Society, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Reset Work, as an exhibition project, in its broadest sense proposes, in the first instance, a stop on the way to reflect on the process of creation, not as a mere aesthetic search, but as an ethical commitment.
2019, Ab æternō (Open Studio). 13th Havana Biennial
Cultural Wound (Digging Up Old Sores)
Personal Side Show to the 13th Havana Biennial. Espacio Vedado Gallery – Open Studio, Havana.
To delve into the Cultural Wound and explore the scissions, fractures and post traumatic cicatrix that contemporary man exhibits as relics or trophies of not fought battles… A way to emphasize an irrepressible need to religare.
2011-2018, 7 Days of Silence (Project)
2011-2018, (Seven) 7 Days of Silence
For a Semiotics of Silence
Ernesto Benitez’s creative pilgrimage, introspection and silence during the last seven years have resulted in the rebirth of his work, which is sustained by the rigorous decantation of the precepts that have rightly defined him and the values that will prompt him in the future. A stop on the way to revisit and dialogue with himself, to question his aesthetic discourse and to reinsert himself… (Claudia Placeres Gómez)… (Claudia Placeres Gómez)
1996-2010, Personal Shows & Series
2010, Philanthropy
The Art of Simulation
Personal Exhibition. La Casona Gallery (Genesis Art Galleries), Havana.
Although the term refers, perhaps, to the best of human beings: solidarity, altruism and disinterest, “Philanthropy” here alludes to fallacious strategies of appearance and simulation; manipulation and demagogy institutionalized and regurgitated with a stench of love for “the others”…
2010, REM (Rapid Eye Movement)
Art-Anthropology: the Real, the Virtual
Personal Exhibition. Magazine For The Arts, Barcelona.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM nomenclature): Dissolution of the frontiers between the real, the ideal and the virtual in the technological era and the confusion this entails. A look at the current philosophical theories of being and the post-human future…
2010, Resource of Probability
Ink & Conté Crayon on Paper
Personal Exhibition. Magazine For The Arts, Madrid.
Speculations about the relationships between the Possible and the Real, the Possible and the Probable, frequently appear in the Western rationalist discourse not always free of a shadow of confusion or contradiction, usually arriving to determine as True and Inevitable that which is represented in the sphere of the Probable…
2009, SaMsara
Environmental New Media Site-Specific Art
Personal Exhibition. Santa Clara Convent, Havana (Side Show to the 12th Havana Biennial).
Saṃsāra is a work conceived as an environmental installation designed for a sacred space (site-specific art installation) that describes a history of splits (scissions), renunciation and impoverishment; of detachment, laziness, death and emptiness. A history of retreat and confinement: a history of resigned anguish and uncertainty about the future. “SaMsara” here is the forgetfulness as a life story: it is the oblivion of our own dismemory…
2008, Logos
Ink & Conté Pencil on Paper
Series of Drawings. Triptych.
“Logos” proposes a dissection of the great ruler of the western society and culture. “Logos” questions the logical (rational) thought, its criterion of the factual and its incapacity to understand more than those phenomena that are outside and free of contradiction; source of the totalitarianism – of left and right – and its exacerbated pragmatism.
2007, All Names of God
Drawing (Conté Pencil) on Paper
Personal Exhibition. La Casona Gallery (Genesis Art Galleries), Havana.
The anxious death of God, proclaimed in the twilight of modernity, has turned out to be a farce by all accounts; an unfulfilled promise that has only succeeded in exacerbating the fervor of a new “faith” among our contemporaries, who, instead of burying the old supreme divinity, have replaced it with myriads of new deities more in line with the new conditions…
2007, Absurd Harmony of Being
Kinetic Installation & Sound
Personal Exhibition. La Casona Gallery (Genesis Art Galleries), Havana.
Kinetic installation made of wood and metal with an electrical and mechanical system that allows each piece to oscillate with a different cadence and emit different acoustic tones. It is inspired by music through the symbolism of the metronome (instrument used to mark a constant pulse or musical tempo) and discusses the “harmony and complementarity” between the opposites…
2006-2010, The process
Painting & Photography on Canvas
Shown in the Personal Exhibition “The Process”, Galiano Gallery, (Genesis Art Galleries), Havana.
Shown in the collective exhibition “Isla Interior”, Art Gallery of the Museum of Rum (Fundación Habana Club), Havana. Organized by Grupo Excelencias; curated by critic and editor David Mateo and sponsored by Banco Sabadell Atlántico…
2006, Diagnostic Exercise
Site-specific New Media Installation
Shown in the personal exhibition Borderline, Villa Manuela Gallery (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba – UNEAC, Havana).
Ernesto Benítez cynically states that this photographic installation is the result of an event of autonomous writing or psychography; he claims that the work came out of nowhere, when an ethereal entity emanating from the collective unconscious recorded these images on his retina and then poured them into the final photographic medium…
2006, Borderline
Site-specific Installations Art
Personal Exhibition. Villa Manuela Gallery (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba-UNEAC, Havana.
Integrated by installations that propose a symbolic flight from the institution Art as “pretended” social space of drainage, liberation or exutorium, to plan, with absolute delight, on some of the most stark miseries of the western culture and its aesthetic of the decadence, the imbalance and the aberration…
2005, Exitus-Reditus
Environmental Art Installation
Personal Exhibition. Servando Gallery (Genesis Art Galleries), Havana.
In a first level, the cartograms (cartographic maps) describing the territory in which the journey takes place were presented. These are drawings made with ash, charcoal, clay, sulfur, and acrylic. In the second level, the works refer to the journey itself, its undertaking from a museographic design drawn in a spiral that the public must go through to interact with the works…
2004-2010, One and a Thousand Eyes
Digital Photography (New Media Art)
Shown for the first time as a personal exhibition at the Art Gallery of the Museum of Rum (Fundación Habana Club), in Havana. In the following years, new works are incorporated to close other analogous and parallel lines of reflection until the series is completed in 2010.
Panopticon: Here the eye of God is alluded to as a metaphor for the omnipresence of the Orwellian Big Brother in order to focus attention on the obsession with surveillance and exacerbated control in contemporary societies…
2002-2004, The Great Flight
Fire and Earth on Paper
Personal Exhibition. Luz y Oficios Gallery (Provincial Center of Plastic Arts and Design – CPAPD), Havana.
The Great Flight, as a counterpart, is conceived from works that propose a transcendental turn and discurs on the symbolic character of the human being and on the appearances as wrappings, clothes that cover with visible veils the essential invisibility of the things, the phenomena and the world…
2000-2002, To Tear the Veil of the Arcane
Drawings Installation (Site-Specific Art)
Personal Exhibition. Espacio Abierto Gallery (Revolution and Culture Magazine) National Council of Plastic Arts (CNAP), Havana.
Personal Exhibition. Luis de Soto Gallery. School of Arts and Letters (Art History), University of Havana.
The installation includes this series of drawings hung -unframed- on the 4 surrounding walls of the gallery with a school desk in front of each work. Here the viewer could sit down and consult or answer a questionnaire written about the piece…
2000, Pain is The Life
Site-specific Installation Art
Personal Exhibition. (Luz y Oficios Gallery (Provincial Center of Plastic Arts and Design – CPAPD, Havana.
These and other works are shown as a personal exhibition at Luz y Oficios Gallery simultaneously with another personal exhibition (En el camino) that Ernesto Benítez also proposed as part of his graduation thesis at the Higher Institute of Art (Instituto Superior de Arte) ISA…
1998, The Body´s Light
Site-specific Art (Ephemeral Environmental)
Personal Exhibition. Gallery L (University Extension Direction), Havana.
Ephemeral work, conceived as a site-specific installation that sacralizes the museographic space and suggests an analogy between the human heart as a traditional symbol of the spiritual center of man and the idea of a cave exposed in Plato’s well-known allegory…
1996, The Exercise of Suspicion
Assemblage, Collages (& Found Object)
Personal Exhibition. Gallery L (University Extension Direction), Havana
Environment -Environmental Art- Installation designed for site-specific with sculptural objects (on paper), found objects and collages: paper and found objects variable dimensions Installation…
1992-1995, Personal Shows and Series
1995, Survivors
Ephemeral Installations (Site-Specific Art)
Domingo Ravenet Gallery. Havana.
The installations were made with sand, lime, stones, wood and other materials recovered from the coasts of Havana, Cuba, during the most critical period of shipwrecks associated with the Cuban migratory phenomenon in1994, well known as (the Rafters’ Crisis) Crisis de los Balseros…
1994-1995, Guantanamera
Painting (oil on canvas) Art and Politics
Personal Exhibition (coinciding with the rafters’ crisis). Open Studio. Jaimanitas. Havana, 1994.
Personal Exhibition. House of Culture of Jaimanitas, Havana, 1995.
Painting. Made with oil on canvas recovered from posters with political propaganda previously used in one of the public parades called by the government at the Revolution Square (Plaza de La Revolución) in La Habana, Cuba.
1993, Delirium
Mixed Media & Collage on Paper
This early series of works accuses the retrograde way of assuming the phenomenon of sexuality in Cuba (from the taboo, homophobia and other social prejudices entrenched in a patriarchal and sexist culture) to question the double standard of a society and an ideological system that, by persecuting, stigmatizing and imprisoning homosexuals, marginalized the LGBT community for several decades without the slightest embarrassment…
1983-1990, Personal Exhibitions and Series
1990, Genesis of the Apocalypse
Painting (Acrylic on Canvas)
Art Gallery of the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Havana
Wifredo Lam Art Gallery, Havana.
Taking advantage of its avidity for the vulgar and the lighter side of society Pop Culture (Pop Art) here constitutes a metaphor of the birth or genesis of the apocalypse in the cultural apotheosis that has subsequently come about in the Western world (with the change of paradigm in the aesthetic and philosophical and the advent of a “post-human” modernity) objectified in the extreme…
1986-1988, Artistic Nude
Human Model Study (of the Natural)
Series of Works. San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Havana.
Artistic Nude (drawings): Works made during the period of art student at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. Note the marked emphasis on the human body anatomy. Direct study of the natural model (techné)…
1983-1986, Xylography - Serial Graphic Work (Artistic Engraving)
Xylography: Serial Graphic (Engraving)
Series of Works. Pautita Concepción, Vocational School of Art (Elementary Level), Havana
These works belong precisely to the first stage of Ernesto Benítez as a student of Fine Arts at the Vocational School of (Fine Arts) Visual Arts Paulita Concepción (in the municipality of El Cerro, Havana).
Wood Engraving -Xylography- (or woodcut) in one or more inks…
Series of Works and Exhibitions (Contemporary Art)
Ernesto Benítez is a contemporary artist who, since the 1990s, has exhibited his work in personal and group shows in Cuba, the United States, Latin America and Europe. His exhibitions are structured in such a way as to articulate different levels of reflection and questioning that revolve around the spiritual dimension of man and the question about the meaning as an opening to transcendence, opposed to the various disguises (masks) and means of alienation that we can find in the sphere of post-modern religiosity. His concept of museographic design leads him to conceive exhibitions that do not leave the seasoned spectator indifferent. Within the framework of contemporary art, his exhibition projects are inclined to tell apparent personal stories that allow him to mask or hide other discursive levels of political, philosophical, social and cultural order.
Exhibitions & Shows: Within Art and Anthropology
Ernesto, who has been living in Europe for a decade – alluding to one of the archetypes he recreates in many of his pieces: the demiurge – cannot help but animate his works with the dense breath of loneliness, the anguish and pain or tension of an scissed existence. His exhibitions (often approached as environmental installations or works conceived for specific spaces -specific-site installations-) explore cultural wounds and the processes of fragmented identity, the self and the deep abyss that separates us from the other in consumer society and culture, among others…
Installative Sculptures, Photography, New Media, Painting and more…
Ernesto Benitez’s artistic proposal has always covered a wide range of techniques, processes, manifestations and materials (installations, new media, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, collages… etc.) In his most recent installation projects and exhibitions, Ernesto seeks to establish a particular counterpoint between cold, quasi-industrial materials (found objects, synthetic fibers, glass and others typical of industrial society) with artisan processes, concepts emanating from logics of thought and cosmovisions called pristine and warmer materials from ancestral cultures and practices.Among the latter we can find: organic matter derived from fire (in its case: coal, ashes from books and diverse texts; personal documents, etc.), natural fiber, clay, salt, gold, bronze, wood and textiles, among others.