IMAGES | STATEMENT | RESUME

FRANCISCO BENITEZ
THE EKPHRASIS SERIES

An ekphrasis is a description by an ancient author of a work of art, be it imagined or real.

In one scene, Encolpius, the main character in Petronius’ Satyricon, comes upon a pinakotheke, or picture gallery, just as he meets his mentor and poet, Eumolpus. This gallery, as in our modern museums, housed a large collection of paintings of the “old masters”, such as Zeuxis and Parrhasios, who were active in 4th century classical Athens.

We are left with a tantalizing account of a number of masterpieces which no longer exist, as we find also in Philostratos’ Imagines or Pausanias’ Guide to Greece. As Pascal Quignard laments, “Time has not preserved the works of Polygnotos, Parrhasios, or of Apelles as it has the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides…we will never see them.” (Le sexe et l’effroi, 1994)

I have became increasingly interested in the many copies (or copies of copies) of “masterworks” created for virtual picture galleries for rich Roman patrons, such as at the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. The fragmentary view we possess today of these ghosts of the ancient Greek past are interpretations and improvisations by the later ancient Roman copyists. Many of the authors of these copies are anonymous; and the works remain before us as simulacra of lost visual schemata. The imagined originals occupy a territory on a numinous plane, forever relegated to the status of “shades” of which we might have glimpses, but whose true nature we will never see.

With my latest series of encaustic paintings I am embarking on a new conceptual project, a metaphorical “pinakotheke” which is inspired by the rich traditions of the Egyptian Fayoum portraits, Pompeian fresco painting, the mosaic tradition, and Greek painting. This allegorical “gallery” will be a fusion of the perceptions, imaginings, of the ancient masterworks with a 21st century artist’s individual traits and cultural specificity. Although in constant dialogue with the past, the work strives to emphasize the almost eerily contemporary aspects described in the ancient texts, such as “more is implied than is depicted” to pictures that “depicted the mind” (Pliny, Natural History XXXV). I would apply certain principles of ancient painting in the sense that one starts with the visible, then one moves to the idea of beauty, then to the to tès psychès èthos, or the “moral” expression of the soul, the “psychic disposition to the crucial moment”. (P. Quignard)