Marcelo Benítez: An Unsettling Rescue
With customary accuracy, María Moreno has defined the scope of the term rescate (rescue, retrieval) in the critical and historiographic operations that refresh our memory and bring us close again to those we’ve unjustly forgotten. “It’s not we who rescue the forgotten; it is they who rescue us.” Names and acts, texts and works from a dormant past beckon to us in a moment of danger. Their tempo is one of alarm: they are activated years after having been conceived, launched into the public sphere, or hidden in drawers. They return as a legacy, a lesson, a warning, and a goad to the imagination. We can be thankful, then — for 2024 is the year we encounter Marcelo Benítez.
This statement calls for some qualification. It is certain that we are witnessing the ‘arrival’ of Benítez’s body of visual work in the contemporary art circuit. It is also certain that Benítez was a central figure in the vibrant, and lately better known, history of gay militancy in Argentina. He is, in fact, one of the few names that stand out both in the first steps taken by the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (he was part of the Grupo Eros) and in the subsequent formations that critically mark the boundaries of the transition to democracy (from the Coordinadora de Grupos Gays, the Grupo Federativo Gay, and the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina to Gays por los Derechos Civiles [Gays for Civil Rights]). He was, too, a sharp-witted writer, an essayist who signed pioneering article on what in the ‘80s here was still called “the homosexual question,” and he made decisive interventions in various publications of the era, from the countercultural El Porteño to the more docile Diferentes, which, while it did envision gay readers as subjects of desire, addressed them above all as subjects of consumption. Encouraged by Jorge Gumier Maier, who believed that, in that magazine of a kind of first “uncovering,” it was possible to practice entryism, Benítez wrote commentaries in which he displayed his formal training as a psychologist and his first-person familiarity with the imbalances that sexual repression breeds.
If all this didn’t escape the attention or the curiosity of historians and activists, we have not had until now a full image of Marcelo Benítez, a complete and complex profile, which, to the above-mentioned facets must be added his less known, and at times more disturbing, forays into poetry, illustration, drawing, and painting. Once again, the archive presents itself to instruct us, through the tireless reparative toil of activist Juan Queiroz, who, from his project Archivos Desviados [Deviant or Deflected, Strayed Archives] and the online magazine Moléculas Malucas [Moluccan, or perhaps ‘Sick,’ ‘Foul’ Molecules], but also in countless institutional efforts and the most intimate gestures of curatorial attention, has impelled us to reconstruct our queer history down to the last detail.
The labors of Queiroz, a close friend of Benítez right up to his death, allow us to present this show not only as the celebration of a visual talent barely known until now, but also as a map in which the pearls from the archive and the personal documents build the solid bridges toward an oeuvre that Benítez began to create in service to his militancy. Indeed, it was his adored nemesis, Néstor Perlongher, who in 1974 asked him to produce the flyers for the FLH and some illustrations for the clandestine newsletter Somos [We Exist]. Outstanding, in this first phase, are the “maricaminantes” [a portmanteau word combining marica, or ‘fairy,’ with caminantes, walkers on a path — trans.] and some slender, quite beautiful flyers which, in their exaltation of the joyfully liberated body, recall Matisse. What follows this first public step forward is a withdrawal into the domestic. During the dictatorship, for obvious reasons, and beyond it, for less obvious reasons, Benítez would continue drawing and painting in the relative safety of his home in Avellaneda, without showing, save for a handful of exceptions, the results of his perseverance. It is thus that today we find ourselves face to face with fairly immaculate treasure that spans three decades and many more shifts in technique and style, and includes subtle drawings and strident painting, brilliant crayon figures and deep dark inks, and which makes use of a whimsical catalogue of Western art history, giving pride of place to classical statuary, Bosch, Rubens and metaphysical painting, but also the noir orientalism of Aubrey Beardsley and the cyborg imaginary of H. R. Giger. Benítez, who didn’t feel quite fit for visual or plastic realization, functions like a copying machine, deftly absorbing all that this sampling of masters offers him to devise erotic and dramatically sexual fantasies, in which what’s staged, quite clearly, is desire, but also its shadows: repression, persecution, madness, illness and death. And if in his first interventions, in those slender pamphlets, the enemies of desire seemed to reside solely in society and its institutions, like so many written and unwritten rules to transform or abolish, in his later works there appears the intuition — a bitter one — that desire and the law, enjoyment and repression, tend to coexist in each of us in an uncomfortable, unsettling intimacy.
Mariano López Seoane
Writer, critic and curator. He is a professor and researcher at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) and New York University (NYU).
We appreciate the valuable collaboration from Juan Queiroz, Washington Cucurto - Galería Sendrós, Hernán Marina and Pedro Paradiso