IMAGES | STATEMENT | RESUME

This past summer Francisco Benitez lived and worked in Southern Italy (Sorrentine Penninsula) where he made a pilgrimage to his favorite sites : the Ancient Roman ruins of Pompeii, Oplontis, Herculaneum, Stabiae and others. Although he has always been fascinated with the Neapolitan Baroque, he found a powerful connection with the visions of these ancient artists who laid the foundations for the great Mediterranean pictorial tradition in centuries to come. In fact, he found the fascination with the human body/drama was very present with the Ancient Romans, and who, partaking in the tradition of the great Greek masters such as Zeuxis and Parhassios, depicted human flesh in a manner unparalleled until the Renaissance. Benitez also found many « œdipal » conflicts dealt with in the Roman artistic tradition, as mothers turn against their children, husbands against wives, brothers against siblings. Indeed, in some ways Ancient Roman painting seems more modern than much work of the past few centuries due to certain visual freedoms which existed in Rome’s pagan culture.

Benítez has studied the Pompeian frescoes in depth and has integrated their conceptual complexity into his ongoing investigations of pictorial narrative. Benitez, in this latest suite of paintings, will draw connections between the art historical remote past and the present day, by continuing his human theater of deception, desire, concealment, and pathos.