Mario Benjamin

Mario Benjamin (* 1964 in Port-au-Prince , Haiti ) is a visual artist. He lives and works in Port-au-Prince and Miami .

Benjamin began his career as a portrait painter, which made him both artistically and financially successful. Driven by feelings of despair and loneliness, however, he radically changed his approach to art. He began to destroy a number of his pictures, which had made him famous, because they seemed to him to be artistically insufficient in their smooth symmetry and harmony. From then on, he began to apply objects such as scraps of cloth, pieces of wood and metal to the canvas as elements that determine the picture and to deform the frames of his pictures himself. He redesigned his house into a total work of art by processing all the walls and furnishings so that they come close to his vision of aesthetics and not a pleasing comfort.

Benjamin's passion is the Baroque formal language , which he tries to interpret with a contemporary approach. He also cites the works of Antoni Gaudí as artistic inspiration .

Exhibitions

• French Cultural Institute, Mexico, 1993
• Otro Pais - Escalas Africanas , CAAM , Las Palmas, 1994/95
• Fundació La Caixa, Palma de Mallorca, 1994/95
• Paula de la Virreina, Barcelona, ​​1994/95
• Eden Rock, Miami Beach, 1996

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Other Journey: Africa and the Diaspora . Edited by the Kunsthalle Krems ( Simon Njami , Ulrike Davis-Sulikowski, Markus Mittringer). Holzhausens, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-900518-46-7 .