01 Apr Francisco Benitez
Past Featured Artists | April 2016
About the Work
Francisco Benitez considers himself an atemporal archaeologist who excavates lost and forgotten styles of painting long assigned to the shadows to reveal the ever-transient nature of the human psyche. Trained in a rigorous atelier program at the Art Student’s League in New York, he frequented museums and copied old master paintings in order to master their techniques and conceptual strategies. However, impelled by an emotional/psychological impulse, he initially embraced a Caravaggesque approach to his subjects, in which narratives were weaved about the subjects as light sculpted their forms out of shadow.
Always concerned with presenting the human psyche in all its complexity, Benitez later discovered the ancient Romans and Greeks, and in his desire to fuse the gravitas of history with the psychological narratives of his subjects, he embarked on a new series of works in encaustic, one of the most ancient painting techniques known to humanity, and one of the most difficult to master.
As the Fayum portraits of Ancient Egypt attest, wax not only served to embalm the dead but to resurrect and revivify the subjects represented. By using the ancient tools and restrained palette of the Greeks, Benitez has isolated the psyche and placed it on center stage, whereby the viewer brings his/her subjectivity to the work and in effect initiates a complicit relationship with memory, history, and the geological layering of the collective human experience through the represented individual.
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Artist Bio
Francisco Benitez is an artist born and raised in New Mexico, who has developed a career both in the US and Europe. Although he worked for many years painting using historical techniques in oil, he became aware of the Fayum portraits, and has enthusiastically embraced encaustic as his main medium in recent years. As a specialist of ancient Greek techniques of the medium, Francisco has given workshops nationally and internationally, at Artisan, R&F Paints, and the National Encaustic Conference in Beverly, Massachusetts, and in Sicily.