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On Mario Benjamin
- Small Axe
- Indiana University Press
- Number 18 (Volume 9, Number 2), September 2005
- pp. 104-108
- Article
- Additional Information
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Small Axe 9.2 (2005) 104-109
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On Mario Benjamin
Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson
In the New World, the baroque aesthetic takes a particular form. As a sensibility, it has been incorrectly defined as excessive ornamentation. The baroque sensibility came to our continent in 1492 in the luggage of the Conquista. Its Catholic and triumphant gold-painted stratagems and artifices, its grand gildings, arabesques, trompe l'oeil, and expressive theatricality, became ingredients in the vast enterprise of colonization. It was a question of persuading the "barbarians" and nonbelievers of the total power of the Roman Apostolic Church.
Embodying this inheritance, contemporary artists in Latin America and the Caribbean use this visual vocabulary as a source of evocative power. In the Caribbean region, Mario Benjamin is among those artists who exploit this language with facility and virtuosity. Benjamin's practice of installation is not derived from the Western avant-garde but emerges spontaneously from this inheritance, which he explored in his early stage sets, particularly for the theater.
The eclecticism of his project defies categorization. Benjamin uses every medium at hand: painting, collage, ready-made, decoration, lighting, projection, photocopies, sculpture. In the early 1990s, he transformed a home in Port-au-Prince, integrating his large paintings of hyperrealist figures—faces and bodies lacerated—into elements of actual decor: drapery, faux antiques, columns, mirrors, frames—themselves drawn from great painters: El Greco, Géricault, and others. Dramatic lighting imposed on these intimate landscapes led him to multimedia practice. Toward the end of the 1980s,in a room of [End Page 104] the Haitian capital's theater, Benjamin showed an installation/multimedia performance that included video images to a flabbergasted audience.
At the 2001 Santo Domingo biennial, Benjamin demonstrated a pronounced taste for the effects of electric light passing through cloth and paper. He built columns covered in black-and-white images of a doll and draped them in black silk organza. Fluorescent light from tubes hidden inside the columns diffused through the paper and the organza, creating a strange, greenish twilight. In March 2002 the same installation was at Port-au-Prince's AfricAméricA cultural center, the effect amplified by the play of mirrors installed along the walls.
In November 2004, in Lespri Endepandan, a group show of Haitian sculptors at the University of South Florida's Frost Museum, Benjamin created a fright room, where a head floated above a body of white tissue bathed in violet light. Garlands of artificial pink and fluorescent orange flowers escaped from the body's torso.
More than symbols and meanings, it is the oneiric and the sublime that justify the gesture in these works.
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Biennal del Caribe, 2002, Santo Domingo Photo credit: Miguel Gomez |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 La parabole de l'apocalyspe selon St-Jean, 1998 Aluminum foil and yellow light M.E.A.C. Badajoz, Spain |
Click for larger view | Figure 3 Mario Benjamin's bedroom Photo credit: Roberto Stephenson |
Click for larger view | Figure 4 Mario Benjamin's bedroom Photo credit: Roberto Stephenson |
Click for larger view | Figure 5 Video installation 2003 (Untitled) Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami Photo credit: Tim McCaffee |
Click for larger view | Figure 6 Mario Benjamin's bedroom Photo credit: Roberto Stephenson |
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