Rooted in the history of painting and its formal developments, Benitez’ practice seeks to synthesize her visual acumen with her personal research into contemporary psychology, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Tantra. Specifically, she has focused on our reflexive Fight-Flight-Freeze response to danger or feeling triggered and wonders whether this defense mechanism can be replaced by a commitment to instead Pause-Stay-Soften. In a moment of increasing social unrest and racism, Benitez occupies a radical no-blame position. Unconvinced by matching aggression with aggression, she begs us to consider: how can we make space for more openness and genuine compassion?

In one way or another, every artwork grapples with the mechanics of energetic transformation in the human body. Often, figures are insinuated then obscured; they crystallize then disappear. Forms exist in liminal states, in flux, emerging, dissolving, cracking open, slipping through, reaching upwards, morphing, and becoming. Through her painting practice, she trains herself to “stay present in the rawness of pure feeling”. For example, Benitez deploys gestural abstraction to activate the sensation of life-force energy that radiates and rises up through the body. Many of her paintings on view read like love letters to intuition and give visual form to the affirmative “yes” feeling that we often experience in our gut. Given that Benitez relies primarily on intuition for her formal decisions, these gestural paintings are not mere exercises for celebrating freewill, but are meta-manifestations of philosophical and spiritual ideals.

Brimming with vibrant colour, Benitez’ paintings oscillate between gestural abstraction and figuration, chaos and order, brute force and tenderness. Simultaneously, they convey fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, contraction and expansion. In celebration of these dualities, this exhibition makes space to contain contradiction and to cultivate our capacity to be with ambiguity.

Wild Silence is an invitation to let go of our habitual storylines; to listen actively and deeply with our whole being; and to open ourselves to the vast world of sensation and interconnectedness.