“My art narrates the relationship between man and nature, his fragility and impermanence.”

With the belief that the artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. “I always absorb new knowledge and information through various media. With the advent of internet, it’s now easier to get information about anything related to my art. I am a believer of new theories and disciplines in art,” as Jonathan Benitez points out about his uniqueness as a visual artist.

Artwork by Jonathan Benitez, Palawan based Filipino Artist. Image used with permission.

His guiding principle is to answer the question: “how can I express the spirit of this age?”

His strong obsession with figures and how they are affected by economic turmoil, poverty, corruption, globalization, natural calamities, and environmental serves as inspiration for his work. Together with his hometown’s plush vegetation—inhabited with greeneries and wildlife made him realized how happy he is living in harmony with the beauty of nature and man.

As the artist confers, it’s hard to prophesized how they will survive as each is consuming the other. His aim is to offer the viewers an alternative point of view to an art experience while showing the delicacies of human conditions and the effects of their behavior on life’s impermanence and fragility.

Benitez collage is a discourse on advertising whose single handiness aspiration is to capture the minds of the viewer by showing a false truth—to express questions of circumstances, displacement and obscured identity, what better platform could there be than the nature of assemblage in collage? Figurative artifacts are laid bare while debatable situations construct parallel universes. The mundane falls in rhythm with the offbeat bordered in conscious composition such as vivid yet surreal landscapes are employed at the hands of the artist.

His first foray in the arts was when he was 10; he came across Vicente Manansala’s watercolor on watercolor paper, “Candle Vendors,” at the back cover of a 1982 issue of Readers Digest—the structured composition and the semi-figurative method of the neutral colors made the depiction honest and truthful. All these hit Benitez hard in a semi-conscious way. Instantaneously, he turned Manansala as his art icon. With an uncle tutoring him on the techniques of watercolor painting and charcoal drawing, Benitez tried to capture the National Artist’s indigenous cubism style as they vividly echoed the Filipino experience.

Primarily interested in becoming an Engineer, Jonathan Benitez left his course to pursue art after her elder sister gifted him with oil paints. Born in Iligan City, Mindanao and now a Puerto Princesa native is pure talent and resourcefulness, noted for taking everyday objects and integrating them in his inceptions to make up for lack of available materials.