Press Release

Jesus Benavente

Ecce Hombre

Chapter 2: Why I Cry Now and Cry Later

17.10- 21.11.2015

 

 

Reception Rome presents Chapter 2: Why I Cry Now and Cry Later, the second installment of Ecce Hombre, Jesus Benavente’s five-part exhibition unfolding across the fall season. Building on the material and conceptual foundations of Chapter 1, this presentation continues Benavente’s exploration of humor, futility, and resilience through an inventive merging of sculpture, video, and light.

Primarily a performance artist, Benavente also creates installations and objects from humble, everyday materials, often transforming hardware-store detritus into sites of meaning. His practice navigates themes of faith, police authoritarianism, national identity, and the complexities of work and value. Born in San Antonio, Texas to immigrant Mexican parents, Benavente often draws parallels between artistic production and systems of labor, while using humor as a tool to confront difficult subject matter. 

 

At the center of this chapter are two video-neon works, an original creation by the artist in which neon lettering is mounted directly onto functioning television screens. Each screen broadcasts original video material, but the radiant glow of the neon letters—“Cry Now” and “Cry Later”—obscures the moving image beneath. Viewers must peer through the blinding brilliance of the tubes in order to perceive the flickering content, confronting the contradiction between illumination and concealment.

 

The installation stages a choreography of looking and obstruction. Entering the gallery, visitors are first drawn toward the oozy green light of Cry Now, its spectral glow spilling across the space. Their path is interrupted by a floor sculpture: a papier-mâché piñata likeness of the artist himself, crushed under the weight of two cinder blocks—a visual and material echo of Chapter 1’s rose-stamped blocks. This figure, playful yet tragic, embodies the artist’s recurring interest in the slippages between celebration and suffering, parody and pathos.

 

Turning around, the viewer encounters the humming yellow light of Cry Later, positioned at the opposite end of the room. Between the two works, a kind of paralysis emerges—caught between looking back with regret and forward with dread. The neon’s celebratory glow transforms the bleakness of this reflection into something perversely optimistic, a bittersweet radiance reminiscent of urban nightlife, memorial altars, and the seductive signage of consumer desire.

 

Benavente’s approach resonates with a lineage of artists who have used light and video as conceptual and emotional material—from Bruce Nauman’s confrontational neons to Nam June Paik’s playful manipulations of television as sculpture, and Félix González-Torres’s tender meditations on absence and loss. Yet Benavente infuses these histories with a distinctly working-class poetics: cheap materials, deadpan humor, and a disarming sincerity that speaks to the precariousness of labor, race, and identity in the present political moment.

 

As in Chapter 1, Ecce Hombre continues to fold satire into devotion, labor into artifice, and failure into endurance. Throughout each chapter, the recurring AI-generated film Ecce Hombre remains on view—a looping portrait of a man aging and absorbing punch after punch, at once comic and devastating. Its presence underscores Benavente’s meditation on violence—both social and self-inflicted—and mirrors our own uneasy relationship to technology as a tool of creation and destruction.

Through these luminous contradictions, Why I Cry Now and Cry Later expands Benavente’s tongue-in-cheek lexicon of resilience, proposing that even our moments of despair can glow with improbable grace.