Press Release

Jesus Benavente

Ecce Hombre

Chapter 3: Why I Get Knocked Down But Get Up Again

21.11 - 10.12.2025

 

Reception Rome is pleased to present Chapter 3: Why I Get Knocked Down But Get Up Again, the third installment of Ecce Hombre, Jesus Benavente’s evolving exhibition unfolding across five chapters from September to December 2025. As with the previous iterations, this chapter continues Benavente’s exploration of endurance, humor, and faith through humble materials and vernacular forms to construct a large-scale sculptural installation.

 

Constructed almost entirely from local newspaper, cardboard, and crepe paper, the installation takes the form of a sprawling raft or fragment of open water. The surface undulates in deep, saturated blues that evoke both a rolling sea and/or a rushing river, situating the work in a place that feels at once mythic and insistently contemporary. Without illustration or didacticism, the piece inevitably calls to mind the precarious migrant sea crossings of the Mediterranean — the vast blue that offers both passage and peril, hope and disappearance.

 

Mounted atop this heaving surface, seemingly suspended in the churn are familiar figures drawn from Benavente’s recurring lexicon: a bald eagle, an NYPD patrol car, Superman, El Chapulín Colorado, amongst others — all fabricated as traditional piñata components by artisans in his native San Antonio, Texas. These characters have circulated throughout Benavente’s exhibitions in various configurations, becoming emblems of satire, aspiration, and vulnerability. Their reappearance here, swept together on a single unstable vessel, amplifies the oscillation between play and tragedy, celebration and sacrifice.

 

Benavente has worked with the piñata form across his career, drawn to its unique union of festivity and violence — the ritualized act of hitting, breaking, and exposing a fragile core. In this installation, that logic expands from an object to an environment. The raft proposes a scene not of triumph or disaster but of the suspended moment between them: not The Raft of the Medusa as it is usually invoked — heroic, allegorical, monumental — but a kind of post-sinking or pre-rescue interval, where the body is caught between doom and deliverance. Géricault’s reeling figures are replaced by bright, absurd, handmade ones whose vulnerability is no less real for being rendered in paper and glue.

 

This chapter also builds upon the material and emotional tensions staged in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 1: Why I Find Miraculous Beauty from Being Cut Down, Benavente introduced the exhibition’s interplay between devotion and labor through a weed-whacker mural made from cut flowers and an installation of rose-stamped cinder blocks — works that tethered beauty to the politics of labor and the poignancy of the handmade. Chapter 2: Why I Cry Now and Cry Later, extended that dialectic through two neon-video sculptures emblazoned with the phrases “Cry Now” and “Cry Later.” The glowing texts, mounted directly over the screens, both illuminated and blocked the imagery beneath them, turning language into a barrier as much as a guide. Their blunt, weary humor framed emotional response itself as a cycle rather than a choice — a mood that continues to shadow the drifting figures of Chapter 3.

 

As with every chapter of Ecce Hombre, the AI-generated film of the same title remains on view. A looping portrait of a man who ages before the viewer’s eyes, enduring an endless series of punches. This digital self-portrait functions as both refrain and mirror: a meditation on violence, repetition, and the absurd heroism of getting up again.