JORDI BENITO

Jordi Benito’s practice is a response to the previous art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art. The conventional materials used in painting or sculpture are rejected and replaced by a new material much more alive, much more mutable: the artist’s body itself.

Jordi Benito work can not be clearly demarcated and isolated, his was an interventionist practice, always conceived in relation to its context, social, historical, and also economic conditions. These apparently external factors must be included in the viewing of his work.

In addition to his own body, Jordi Benito often used found or “humble” objects and materials, much in tune with Arte Povera movement, and of course after the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.

Subversive and complicated are perhaps the two characteristics that mark all of Jordi Benito’s work.

Moreover, Benito always moved on the border between the pain and the destruction he put into practice on his own body. An example of this is the actions in which he threw himself against a brick wall, bathed in quicklime, or when he got into a jerrycan without breathing. This idea of taking bodily pain to the limit in line with Viennese Actionism, raises the concept of Action/Reaction; a response to the general malaise of Spanish society through the somatization of psychic and mental pain.

Benito’s later work was dedicated to creating sound installations, with the piano as the main instrument, as well as environments with neon lights.