STATEMENT

Mariano Benavente

Statement

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My work investigates the narrative possibilities of painting and, at the same time, explores its own materiality: the manual work, the comings and goings, the modifications and regrets in working with oil. I am interested that the work shows some concerns linked to the construction of images in which easily recognizable elements participate, but in which my interest in exploring the resources of painting as a language is mainly revealed. I intend to go in search of the motif from the physical and improvised gesture from which the pictorial image emerges.

The group of works that I am working on approaches a genre that has been historically explored and updated, investigated and re-interpreted, such as still life and flower painting.

I am interested that the pieces generate different scopes of the versatility and insistence that this genre continues to present in the field of painting and contemporary art.

My main concerns, about time and history, memory, the original and its versions, are revealed in both the content and the working process, allowing me to suggest subtle narratives beneath the surface of the works.

It is important to me that the development of that practice reserves a central place for the different treatments and modes of painting, colour, forms and textures. My intention is that the crossings and developments that arise in the making result in an image that does not cease to belong to the genre I choose but that at the same time is blurred in questions, in conflicts and manages to configure itself from its own ways, related to a tradition and a group of painters that constitute a kind of personal family tree.

I take as a reference for my work process the idea of copying a painting. Only to use it as a starting point. The initial traces are lost in the process and allow me to establish new relationships with painting, its codes and motifs, transforming my own initiatives permanently and proposing a work that can only affirm its own process, its uncertainties and distrust.

I follow the traditions of western painting particularly I take the paintings of some Argentinean painters who worked in this same country but many decades ago. They did the same kind of painting, but in an absolutely different world. I keep the same technique and materials they used but I am subject to other conditions. One of the operations I perform is the change of scale, painting the motifs much larger than the original works. I imagine what motivations led those artists to do their work and from that I try to reproduce the techniques, the ways of developing the practice of painting and understand the interests that an Argentine painter of the mid-twentieth century developed in the same city where I live but many years before.

I bring to the present through my experience as an artist, the legacy of those who preceded me and try to dialogue with his work debating some ideas.