THE SIT DOWN
18: ANA BENAVIDES
At the time, she didn't see a local art degree as the right path for the kind of practice she wanted to pursue, and her parents weren't ready to let her go abroad, so instead she studied Advertising and Marketing Communications, reasoning that if she was going to be an artist she'd need to understand the business side too. She kept painting throughout. A graduation present from her parents — a week-long painting course at UAL in London — turned out to be decisive. Back home, she began researching leading painting MAs internationally, applied to two of the programmes she admired most, and was accepted to both. She chose the RCA.
The work then was pop art, and she's clear that the RCA was where the practice she has now began. She arrived feeling underqualified beside classmates with fine art degrees, and the first year was hard — competitive, and a real adjustment from the culture she'd grown up in. But she is persistent by nature, and the pressure she put on herself became the thing that formed her. She graduated in 2023 into what she describes as the real world, with no creative family to show her what being an artist actually involved.
Her paintings rest on three things: colour, gesture, and texture. Colour she attributes to Mexico, where it was so much a part of daily life that it sits in her subconscious rather than her decisions. Gesture came from somewhere more complicated. She grew up in a conservative Catholic environment where she encountered strong expectations around women and their roles, and the sweeping, bodily marks in her work — especially the early work — were a way of getting out from under those beliefs, a liberation that moving to London only amplified. Texture is what turns feeling into something you can almost touch: sand, marble powder in different grades, wax, and oil, layered until the surface has a physical presence that photographs never quite capture.
What the paintings are for is simpler to state. She sees a world that is overstimulated and chaotic, and wants her work to be a place to stop and go inward — to sit with the emotions we'd rather not look at as much as the ones we love. Hilma af Klint is her idol, and Kandinsky and Joan Mitchell are close behind, painters for whom colour was a spiritual or synaesthetic language rather than decoration. If someone stands in front of a painting and feels something, even if it isn't what she intended, she considers the work as having had its desired effect.
She describes her act of painting as a conversation with the canvas: one brushstroke, a response, another. It happens fast, and it depends on reaching a state where she stops analysing altogether. Her best work comes from there. She has historically resisted working in tightly defined series, believing each canvas carries its own energy and shouldn't be forced into a theme, though this year she has become more interested in threading certain colours across works so they speak to one another.
The three years since the RCA have followed the arc most artists eventually learn to expect. The first brought opportunities in quick succession — Tabula Rasa and Haricot Gallery in London, T293 in Rome, a solo show titled Why Are We So Afraid of Feeling? at L.U.P.O. in Milan, and exhibitions as far as Shanghai and Dubai. The second taught her about silence. The third has been about making sure her future doesn't rest entirely in other people's hands: she still teaches children, and has begun running workshops on her creative process and what happens when you become present enough to turn down the volume on your own thoughts. She talks about growth the way she talks about painting — slowly, step by step, building a base solid enough to hold whatever comes next. Comparison, she says, is a game you always lose.