ERICK ANTONIO BENITEZ, Aequipoesis.264, 2025

Archival Pigment Print

17 x 11 in

Edition of 15 + AP 

Signed and numbered by the artist

Accompanied by a certificate from Always Art

Aequipoesis.264 stages a meeting between myth and the digital image. The title references H.264, a common video compression codec, evoking how digital systems condense and reformat information. At the center, a clay-colored, hyperreal 3D-rendered mouth inscribed with “I NEED $” creates a diptych alongside a blurred photograph of a taxidermied deer reminiscent of a display in a natural history museum. In the corner, a faint, cartoon-like figure appears, its blown-up face referencing Thunder, a villain from Big Trouble in Little China, frozen in the moment before his body expands and bursts. Its eyes peer out from another dimension, pixelated and uncertain. Together, these elements map human desire and the commodification of nature onto a shared visual field. Diagrammatic lines evoke a digital system of measurement and control, where the clear and the distorted, the natural and the synthetic, exist side by side in uneasy balance. Aequipoesis, meaning “the act of creating balance”, emerges as both a technical and mythic process of continual recalibration.

BIO: Erick Antonio Benitez (b. Bronx, NY) is a Salvadoran-American multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator and musician based in Los Angeles and New York City. They received an MFA in Art + Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2023 and a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. Benitez has exhibited work at The Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (VA), Connor Smith Gallery (DC), Dinner Gallery (NYC), Untitled Art Fair (Miami, FL), Galerie B-312 (Montreal, QC), La Fábrica (San Salvador, SV), SWAB Art Fair (Barcelona, ES), and Simultan Festival (Timișoara, RO). Their work has been reviewed by ARTnews, The Washington Post, BmoreArt, The American Scholar, The Daily Lazy, Terremoto (MX), Mediana Magazine (SV), and Le Devoir (QC), and has appeared in printed publications including New American Paintings (Issue 154), BmoreArt (Issue 6), and Johns Hopkins: Special Collections. Benitez is the recipient of the Charles Gaines Fellowship Award, the Janet and Walter Sondheim Award, the Ruby Artist Project Grant in Performing and Media Arts, and the MASB Travel Artist Award, and has participated in residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), LFBK Residency (La Libertad, SV), and Pigment Sauvage “La Track” Residency (Montreal, QC, Canada). Currently, Benitez is an AICAD Teaching Fellow at the Yale School of Art.