BENJAMÍN CANO

The secret life of air.

October 8, 2014 – January 11, 2015

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente presents the work of Benjamín Cano, architect of prestigious acclaim and plastic artist of largely unrevealed works, which promises a true surprise.

Cano expresses similar existential, spiritual, and poetic concerns throughout his painting, sculpture, assemblages, photography, drawing, and graphic works. Cano’s expertise is seated in his knowledge of materials, allowing him to extract the maximum expression from them. His process is essentially linked to an analysis of the body’s organic functioning, but also to the life of different materials found in nature. Informalism, fully revitalized, serves as the point of reference: gestures, traces, material qualities, and employed techniques entwine together with extraordinary mastery. Plaster, gauze, cotton, resin, wood and pigments, paper or found objects are the materials that Cano modifies and shapes to draw a breath of life from them, endowing them with meaning. Cano is a mystic who hears out the secret of existence in material transformations, in different organic states that beget new life. These are transformations that implicitly bear countless wounds. The subtle use of transparencies, veils, and fusions capture these processes full of light and pain while at the same time revealing compassion and surrender.

In this exhibition titled Vida secreta del aire (The Secret Life of Air),air is a metaphor for breathing, the breeze of life, the vital breath, and the spirit.

Cano is an artist whose abstraction holds to nature, existence, the human condition, and an exploration into the transcendent meaning of life traversing the body, organic matter, sensuousness, emotional life, and thought. In the words of the exhibition’s curator, “the artist performs open-heart surgery on matter, like a surgeon who cuts the skin of an organism until he reaches its entrails and feels the pulse of its arteries.”

The exhibition is organized around six themes:

COMPOSITIONS: This series of small assemblages and carpentry work titled El Hijo del carpintero (The Carpenter’s Son), evokes the everyday labors and hidden life of Jesus of Nazareth.

THE PATH OF THE WIND: The artist’s book The Path of the Wind provides facsimiles of three sketchbooks that reflect different organic states in constant becoming. In them, one senses the passage from death to new life. A sensible awe for what takes place in the threshold dividing the physical world from the spiritual, being from non-being.

TRACES: Plaster reliefs that, like death masks, uncover the points of contact between absence and presence. These sculptures were created by pouring plaster directly onto the ground on the roadside after a storm. Among these and other plaster reliefs is the original cast for the monumental mural at the new Public Library of Segovia, Cano’s own work.

REVELATIONS: This hall displays drawings, graphic works, monotypes, and engravings. A subject matter charged with mystery where, again, life and death, light and darkness, converge at their edgework.

INLAND: The original photographs displayed here are presented for visitors as they appear in the publication INLAND. Their ways of looking delve into nature, the forest, the field, the snow, the tree trunk, until they reach the obscure beauty buried beneath the surface. Contrasting each other in this montage, one part is linked to the notion of infinite space and the other, fragmentary micro-worlds whose rhythmic presentation appears as a system of annotation or a musical score.

PNEUMA: The exhibition culminates with sculptures made of gauze, fabrics, screens, and resin, making reference to trauma, atonement, and resurrection inspired by the quote from the evangelist Luke 24:12-13 “And so he entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying by themselves and the shroud that covered his head, not beside the strips of linen, but bundled separately.”

Sponsored by Amigos del Museo.