By Ramón Cabrera Salort
“There is not an astronomical time, which is the same
for all, but different for everyone, but different inner times”
Ernesto Sábato
Ernesto Benitez is a young artist who since the mid 90’s 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 alchemy, on the artist as shaman, and materials such as charcoal, ash, salt, wood and iron, or photography as a transmutative procedure, among others, have been components of the configuration of his proposals. In the Tenth Havana Biennial Ernesto has continued his saga of the adept -the adept will be the alchemist who advanced in knowledge and wisdom watches over the purity of the Work- with his personal exhibition Saṃsāra. The artist himself makes it clear to us that with such a title he alludes to the cycle of transmigrations in the reality of the temporal and phenomenal world[1]. Ernesto thus returns to his usual mythical-magical references and to his direct allusion to death as the necessary reverse of life. With this he leaves evidence of what Sábato pointed out as the metaphysical condition of man: his yearning for the absolute, the impulse to rebellion, the anguish in the face of loneliness and death. Now, however, without abandoning this condition thematically, he makes his proposal from another morphological perspective aided by digital technology.
The piece in the exhibition, as described by its author, is the sculptural reproduction of a funerary stone, a tombstone used in cemeteries to mark the site of a grave, carved in marble, measuring approximately 50 x 70 x 20 cm. Instead of the inscriptions that are traditionally engraved on the front surface of these stelae to refer to the name of the deceased and the dates of birth and death, there are three digital references built for this purpose. The first identifies him as the deceased to whom the cipo is dedicated and marks him not by name but by a set of numbers of impersonal and cryptic reference – passport number, identification number of any nature? Contemporary man as a cipher. The second are digits of individual allusion with the exact date and time of birth of the artist (year, month, day, hour, minute and second without separations between them, because time is a fluid, something that runs). A third reference is a clock that marks in “real” time the date and time of the moment of the exhibition. There are three numerical references, one clearly noticed as a clock since its digits change, but without us knowing exactly what it measures -what clock? and the other two -possible stopped clocks? inhabitants, then, of an island stopped in time?- exposed to the evidence of the spectator’s conjecture and perplexity. Between those three numerical references, the reality of what we are is alluded to: that interweaving of numbers points out the enigma of existence as an “alien” -we are always numbered by others- and its poquette -scarcely a few digits mark our identity. The spectator himself attends unnoticed to the present time of the work that no more perceived is already the past, even his past.
But Saṃsāra, too, owes part of its expressive forcefulness to the space where the piece was placed. The choice of the exhibition site was a matter of delicate and acute search for the artist. The finding of that room in the Convent of Santa Clara was a revelation and created an environment. Unusual for common exhibition intentions, to host Ernesto Benítez’s piece became a substantive part of the proposal: The moss and humidity, the peeling of its walls, the gloom of the enclosure and the abandoned window openings, between which the cipo was placed, sealed a testimony of imperceptible changes in the midst of the intimate, the ambiguous happening that accompanies death in the river of life and the evidence, among others, that there is no astronomical time for everyone, but different interior times.
Notes:
[1] ‘Saṃsāra’ refers to the concept of reincarnation in various philosophical traditions. According to Buddhism the perennial round of saṃsāra has no beginning and no end and we are all trapped in it until we gain ILLUMINATION. The artist intentionally conceives his piece linked to such referents.
May 2, 2009.