Christian Bendayán

It is interesting to note that contemporary Amazonian art today includes an introspective perspective that recognizes our origins and emphasizes the importance of respecting and conserving nature.

It also provides a wealth of information about myths, legends, and other parallel “realities” in which the Amazonian people coexist, offering a unique insight into their culture.

Bendayán’s artistic journey, from his first self-taught steps to his mastery of the technique, has given the popular profile and its mass version a unique allegorical density. This density not only manifests itself in his work but also extends to real life, from where his images and portraits emerge unaltered.

The life that Bendayán examines on his canvas seems to emerge from a fantasy that shines hidden in the lumpen underworld and local poverty. At the extremes, this approach reveals the unusual color of a social object not always identified.

The black light, represented by the neon tube of the disco that rescues certain colors from the shadows, masterfully explains the process of Bendayán’s gaze, highlighting life and brilliance in the darkness.

This process is manifested not only in the mimetic redemption of regional visual and nocturnal culture and the icons of popular Amazonian painting but also in the exhumation and radiance of what pressure and convention try to evade from the gaze that is intended to be sublime.

Bendayán fuses traditions and the allegorical, creating scenes that defy the classification between violent portrait and homage.

His works seek a representation that eliminates the barriers of simple portraiture, moving pictoriality to the terrain of the ambivalent appearance of the flat decoration of traditional Iquitos mural painting and highlighting the perspective of massive pop illustration.

Between almanacs, cheerfully distorted cultural references, and crude vignettes, the result is a brief kitsch, ephemeral glow that emphatically emphasizes a popular aspect and sometimes hides it, revealing a heated and radical ethos that roars behind what appears to be a simple vital and exploratory decoration.

Bendayán manages to capture the intensity of daily life and its images, infusing precise vitality in each intervention on the skin and various surfaces.

In his works, Bendayán builds a precise warp, and from its background plot emerges the imperfect vision of a tropical and twilight utopia.

This vision, Edenic and rarefied, metaphorically assumes the ordering and genesis, winking at the Judeotropical root of his amazonian(charapa) genealogy and embracing the idea of ​​a common affiliation, a cultural, ethical, and aesthetic identification with the margin and its redemption, both inside and outside. of the canvas.

Christian Bendayán, with his brushes and vibrant colors, continues to explore the frontiers of identity, culture, and aesthetics on the canvas of the Peruvian Amazon.