If art is man’s expression of his deepest, most unsatisfied need, it must be said that Benjamin has sought to locate, to name and at last to satisfy the ineffable. Taking anywhere from 30 minutes to 80 hours, painting is his paradigm for the indomitable energy of life itself. Gregarious and sociable, at times extroverted and always eccentric, Benjamin, like his art, defies conformity and categorization. Never limiting himself, he commands with natural ease and power all manner of media and subjects.

Self-taught in his art and auto-didactic in his study of the masters, the mentors of Benjamin have been none other than Caravaggio, Renoir, Vermeer, Esher, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Cassatt, Monet... and the incomparable Picasso. It is with the latter’s exuberant love of life and art that Benjamin creates. He has said of the film “Surviving Picasso”, “It is as if I was watching myself. I could totally relate to his insatiable desire to indulge beauty.” Thus, in a self-imposed exile from society, Benjamin went underground for 12 years, completely submerging himself in his art with an unrelenting, cathartic vigor and the martyrs’ spirit of the poetic maudité.

The life and art of Benjamin are a single reflection of the profound passion he has for both. In his work the two are inextricably bound as one in intricate chiaroscuro of light and shadow. His art, as his life, is struck in that rare and nervous balance; the charged struggle between the primordial dualities of night and day, love and death, good and evil, and more especially of that small-embattled space between. As Degas famously said “A painting demands as much planning, malice and vice as does the perpetration of a crime.”