Kuki Benski in the chocolate factory

”the art of Kuki Benski consolidates her childhood imaginaries and reinvents them as erotic fantasies.”

Thus, like Alice in the land of Eros, Benski plunges into a world of symbolic reinterpretation through humour and the creation of satirical characters where she disassembles stereotypes in an original approach to female eroticism.

By resorting to collage and mixed techniques with acrylic, enamel and glitter, Kuki recreates the settings of her magical universe charged with the childhood experiences that have undoubtedly enlivened her senses.

She recalls with exquisite tenderness how her father Abrascha and her mother Nikolita fled from Russia via Rumania and settled in Argentina in the 1940s to pursue the family tradition of making chocolate. She remembers how she felt intensely drawn by the color and scintillating labels and tinsel paper wrappings on candy and chocolate boxes that would arrive from all over the world to the Benski kitchen table. There, she would indulge, succumb to the pleasures of the palate while her father was patiently and lovingly concocting the unforgettable Cabsha, an all time classic chocolate which in an Arabic dialect signifies: “I love you”.

That universal flavour, that wonderful feast of shimmering colour and the smooth texture that were forever engraved on the artist’s senses and recollections are very much a signature of her work which, as tempting and irresistibly sensual as the chocolate, lifts both the body and soul to a new dimension of mysticism and desire.

And even if Kuki Benski continues to mock the mass culture stereotypes of our day, in the same way that Lewis Carroll awarded childhood with a wonderland, she is devoted to combining the ideals of freedom and beauty with Edenic innocence in a world where the body and human contact can be relished with no feeling of guilt.