BY ROCIO CERON
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This Was No Nostalgia For Oneself, But Nostalgia For Man. -Ehitel Silva Zegarra

Art, in its relationship with the world and the other, has always kept an incessant quest in order to ascertain a passage that makes us see the truth through the edge of a work. Lizet Benrey is not far from this concept. An artist labeled by a double nationality -Mexican by birth, and American by residence- her roots and daily life are intertwined. If the face of the world is polyhedral, just like light and its many gleams, dexterity in an artist consists of deciphering the threads that configure the warp of shapes. It also consists of reinterpreting the chromatic phenomena and memory contexts, the historical events involving it, and its very own spirit in connection with the breeze of days. Benrey enlightens the viewer through her plastic metaphors about serenity and passion, apparent antipodes brought together by the artist’s work.

Monotype, the graphic discipline chosen by Benrey, featuring its pictorial character, intertwines that abstract and evocative. She gives us pieces of excellent creation through which she unveils a celebrating universe. A celebration of light and opacity, but also a celebration of nostalgia and loss. The artist is an observer of the human condition and its variables; this way, between the captured movement and the fragmentation of shapes, the artist achieves a sensorial symbiosis. On one hand, the feelings of slowness, sadness; on the other, a burst of fragmentary shapes, an ode to life, by the grace taken from the fact of creation itself. Although in a first reading this artist’s work could cause the viewer to develop a certain air of disenchantment, the chromatic set with predominant notes of cold colors is subdued by an acute use of accentuating lively colors such as those of reddish, orange, loamy, and electric blue tones, that give back the viewer a sensation of a certain hope. Vitality is announced in those lines and a gesticulation lit by such gleams opens a potential way to touch life and blow a breath of life into the work, like an ember meaning to find hope, a path of light

A small work format, it is in its own powerful inner dynamism where lines and risks get sparked off. The existing relationship among the elements sets a constant tension within the composition’s core. From a fragment one can get a notion of the center; each snapshot of both the spiritual and the mundane realms opens a possibility to sense creation and destruction; thus, the plastic proposal by Lizet Benrey is clear: an incisive look (always questioning) takes one to catch a glimpse of man’s spiritual misery and his possible change, his possible redemption. That is the artist’s bet, to question oneself, to set free that which has been seen, hence allowing oneself to establish a dialogue between vulnerability and strength. The work of Benrey quests far beyond the sheer piece, means to create a dialogue with its visual speaker from their soul; not only does it create in itself, but it also creates in the conscience of all who have been seen the world from its greatness and void. Thus, her work is highly human, and so small, because the art that touches the fibers of thought and heart does not need grandiloquence: it requires the brief space of that who has viewed just the necessary to give it back with the power granted by sincerity. Strength and risk, a passion for diluting herself in each work in order to get right before the viewer’s seduced eyes. Lizet Benrey creates small universes where both time and the other look in the mirror.

Mexico city
Translated by Gerardo Lazos