Henry Rodríguez Bienes

Henry Rodríguez Bienes
b. 1981
Havana, Cuba
lives and works in Mexico City, MX

”My work is fundamentally based on symbolic language, which allows me to reduce the objects and events of daily life and of our culture as a civilization to the simplest and purest form of symbol and sign. I drink from ancient cultures, Egyptians, Sumerians, Mayans and Aztecs, to name a few. I explore the past and bring this narrative to the present with a modernist air. I appropriate symbols and archetypes from all world cultures as well as religions, and brotherhoods and make them live in the same space and time; creating a universal language from our present. It is important to emphasize that what we understand today as cave art, Paleolithic, Neolithic, Egyptian, Sumerian, had nothing to do with the concept that we have today of "Art". Art does not understand what is beautiful or ugly. For ancient cultures it was a kind of ritual, an act of expression that had the objective of capturing and conserving knowledge, culture and beliefs in the most essential and forceful way. That is the essence of the art that I am interested in bringing to the present through my work. An art that speaks of the entire human civilization from the symbolic language and that remains recorded for future generations.” - Henry Rodríguez Bienes

Rodríguez Bienes attended La Escuela Profesional de Artes Plásticas in Matanzas, where on graduation in 2005 he was offered the position of Professor of Drawing and Artistic Anatomy, the youngest to hold the position in the school’s history.

In 2008, representing his province, he was invited to collaborate as a teacher of fine art, in Caracas, Venezuela. This new experience outside his home country energizes him. His collaboration in Venezuela ended in 2010 and he was forced to return to Cuba. Bienes found the re-adaptation to the Cuban system, to immobility and scarcity in all senses especially creativity, very difficult. Despite experiencing an existential crisis of sorts, Bienes enrolled at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, studying conservation and restoration.

2015 sees Bienes invited once again to an artistic collaboration off the island, this time in Mexico. During this time Bienes studied Mexican murals and participated in an a group exhibition organized by Instituto Morelos in the city of Uruapan, Michoacán, where his work receives a prize. After meeting the woman who would become his wife, Bienes decided to remain in Mexico, where he continues to live and work today.

"I remain utterly fascinated by this body of work. Bienes presents text and a few instantly recognizable symbols which are orienting and serve to provide the viewer with a sense of the familiar. He calms you and draws you nearer the work, then proceeds to bypass the conscious mind completely and speak directly to the subconscious, which of course, was the plan all along.
The more abstract works present as Rorschachian ink blots, or perhaps x-rays of some alien species, either way, with each viewing new elements are discovered. Ultimately one wonders, are we exploring the artist's mind, or our own?"
- Stacy Conde