Synergy: Crisis Room (Borderline series)
2006
Glass, wood, steel, ropes and drawing with intravenous (IV) on wall.
690 x 180 x 30 cm. (variable dimensions Installation)
Work of Environmental Art. Shown for the first time in “Borderline”, Personal Exhibition, Villa Manuela Gallery (UNEAC), Havana.
Borderline Situation: Self-reflection (Life History) and The Nothingness
In borderline situations, either nothingness is shown or it becomes palpable (…)”.
Karl Jaspers
Introduction to the philosophy”
The aforementioned author finds the origin of philosophy in doubt and, in extreme or limit situations, which also propitiate the experience of transcendence. Well, this work is born, precisely, from an experiential or autobiographical passage of this nature. In such a situation, the work proposes a reflection on learning of dying. Life here is assumed as a journey that is not governed by mere translation in space, but by the tension of change, transformation and mutation.In this sense, the work proposes constant autobiographical references (some veiled, others more evident) of an existential nature.
Synergy: Immanence-Transcendence
In the context of the tropological discourse proposed by this work, the following stand out: the symbolism of the knife (almost omnipresent in Ernesto Benítez’s artistic production) as an element that reinforces the idea of nonformulated but latent death; an intravenous conduit of serum (IV) that draws -at the rhythm of five agonizing beats- between alpha and omega, an electrocardiogram topped by a rose (an experience of double nature: coincidence opositorum).
The piece evokes a wide symbolic range that refers to the disturbing and random existential contingency in order to describe the experience of a limit situation and its repercussion on the spiritual plane, an ambit in which the transcendent dimension of the human being is evident per se.