Luis Fernando Benedit Exposed the Politics of World-Making

If the artist’s name wasn’t clearly printed on the wall labels, I would have thought that Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) was two separate exhibitions. The late Argentine artist’s first major exhibition in New York since a 1972 show at the Museum of Modern Art begins with a room of bright Pop Art-esque paintings before opening to a conceptual world of bioart habitats.

Inspired by the international Pop Art scene, Benedit also developed an interest in outdoor spaces, biology, and ecology after receiving his degree in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires in 1963. Although the show spans just 1966 to 1972, it’s a crucial period in Benedit’s practice, resulting in what might appear to be a complete break from one body of work to another. But while the paintings (dating 1966–68) and habitats for plants, insects, and other small animals (1968–1972, all unoccupied here) may look unconnected, the former hint at the latter. 

The paintings’ globular forms seem to fluctuate between organisms and objects. The title of one of these works, “Vegetal Architecture 5” (1966), gestures to this dichotomy of the natural and human-made, which the artist would later question. The image itself conflates the two, its soft-edged geometric shapes lined with rounded teeth or cogs, and what could be a golf club and ball at the center.

By the following year, Benedit’s paintings had become more cartoon-like and representational, bluntly rendered in flat, solid colors. In works such as “Rabbit Cacciatore” (1967), nebulous forms have morphed into grotesque allusions to biological experiments: A rabbit and another animal seem to be turned inside out. It’s unclear whether they’re torture victims or Frankenstein’s monsters, but either way, this is no pastoral scene.

That same year, Benedit studied landscape design on a fellowship in Rome, where he met artist Jannis Kounellis, who had exhibited live animals in a gallery. In 1968, Benedit was among a group of artists who co-founded the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, a Buenos Aires-based arts organization centered on systems art and cybernetics. 

The bioart habitats that anchor the exhibition’s second half tread a philosophical line between art and science by raising issues — then prescient, now pressing — about surveillance and control, but prioritizing questions over answers. 

Transparent environments for small life forms in various shapes and sizes — from simple cylinders to structures connected with tubes and pathways — suggest the studying and shaping of nonhuman behavior. But with no standardized habitat, what would we be observing?

If systems art creatively explores how systems arise through relationships, the question of “nature versus culture” is always implicit. Benedit’s habitats eerily reflect human environments, from the micro to the macro, where sociopolitical and socioeconomic cultural conditions force the illusion of standardization as a natural state when the same conditions also foster radical difference.

The habitats are accompanied by detailed architectural drawings of others, both realized and unrealized, along with archival photographs, documents, and the title work, Benedit’s only human habitat. Composed of motion-sensor lights and mirrors mounted on tripods, all surrounding a box on a platform, “Invisible Labyrinth” (1970) invites visitors to enter the installation and approach the box. Navigate the light beams incorrectly, though, and an alarm will sound (as it did for me); follow them correctly, and you’ve learned the rules of the system. 

It’s worth noting that Benedit created his work against a backdrop of violent dictatorships and political upheaval in Argentina. In the best of times, Invisible Labyrinths would be a fascinating thought experiment, but today, as in its historical moment, it lays bare the realities of world-building in its many shades of chaos and control.

Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths continues at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (142 Franklin Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 5. The exhibition was curated by Laura Hakel, Bernardo Mosqueira, and Olivia Casa.