JOSÉ BENITEZ MONTILLA (Antequera, Málaga, 1963). "Pan-Hellenic... Lot 41

JOSÉ BENITEZ MONTILLA (Antequera, Málaga, 1963). "Pan-Hellenic games". 2013. Mixed media on panel. Signed in the lower right corner; signed, titled and dated on the back. Size: 95 x 125 cm. The title of this painting evokes the magnanimous festivals that in Ancient Greece had the task of uniting the community and appeasing discord. They were in some way spectacular formulas for channelling violence and competitive anxieties through play. José Benítez seems to reflect in some veiled and mysterious way on this polarity between gentleness and the violence that erupts in crowds. In this painting, his characteristic pseudo-human masses reappear, made up of strange homunculi occupying a territory that is inaccessible to the senses. The idea of the infinitude of the landscape and the insignificance of the individual also seem to pulsate in the background of this subjugating composition. José Benítez Montilla showed his work for the first time in 1987, in the Colectiva Arte Joven Malagueño organised by the Corte Inglés (Málaga), in the 1994 edition of which he participated again. Since then he has participated in various collective exhibitions, such as the Second UNICAJA Young Painting Exhibition (1990), the Ron Bacardí Collective (1994), "Andalusia in Matsu" (Taiwan, 2000), "Art Essencials" in Calgary (Canada), Dallas and Los Angeles (2001) and "Art Miami 2003", as well as those held in the Martín Cantero galleries in Marbella (1995), Garduño de Sevilla (1995), Alejandro Blanco de Málaga (1996), Monsalves de Sevilla (1997) and Cesarea de Boca Raton, Florida (USA, 2000), to the most recent ones in Galería 3 Punts (2017), Feria Art Madrid (2017), galería Juan Risso de Madrid (2018), galería Cefererino Navarro de Granada (2018), among many others. He made his solo debut in 1989, in the Ateneo de Málaga exhibition hall, and since then he has held personal exhibitions in various galleries in Benalmádena, Antequera, Málaga and Granada, and abroad in the Fine Art gallery in London (2003). He has collaborated with the art magazine "La Traíña" (1995), in the installation and setting of the Instituto Andaluz del Mueble, with the collaboration of the Ronda Town Hall and Paradores de Turismo de España (1999), and in 2002 with the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Málaga. During the last few years he has also created stage designs for theatre: "Antigona de Sófocles" (S. Langlois, 2002), "El Embrujado" (I. Viñals, 2002), for which he also designed the costumes, and "Como polvo enamorado" (M.L. Jurado, 2003). He has worked on the scenography and costumes for "Doble perfil", by I. Viñals, and for the scenic space of "Don Juan Enamorado" by S. Langlois. Benítez's pictorial language is above all conceptual, and seems to seek the viewer's gaze to complete his message, thus integrating us into his personal artistic universe. His work shows the expressive capacity and forms of the abstract lyric, but at the same time it is based on rigorous and meditated compositions which in a certain way evoke scenarios. These are organised around nuanced horizons, endowed with vibrant textures, on which architectural and anatomical constructions, always ambiguous, are superimposed. However, Benítez adds a further dimension to his work, which has finally shaped a purely personal language: sensory evocations. His are complex and elaborate textures, which function as a destabilising element in his paintings, completing the rhetorical game.