BENDITO’S COLOR PALETTES PROVIDE THE VIEWER WITH AN ALTERNATIVE ENTRY POINT FOR THE EVENTS THAT THEY DEPICT. –Dossin
The project started as Bendito helplessly watched from his computer as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Indian Ocean burst into a tsunami, and Port-auPrince collapsed in the shocks of an earthquake. His way of making sense of those photographs of a reality so terribly absurd and ungraspable was to bring them into his own world, and think them in colors. Bendito is indeed first and foremost a color theorist; others would say he is a digital wizard, who uses the dry language of computer sciences to invent colors algorithmically and create new (digital) realities, as seen in his Color Code series3. Digital color was thus his entry point in those pictures of disasters. For months, Bendito looked at them in his computer, studying their color variations, searching for a connection and a meaning in all this destruction. In a photograph of the 2007 flood in China, he recognized, within the maroon of the muddy water, the orange of the survivors’ lifejackets. The orange hue was the thin thread that still connected the victims to the natural elements that engulfed them. For Chile Earthquake, Concepcion: 2010 (Page 13), in a photograph of the 2010 earthquake in Chile (Page 13.1), he connected the grey colors of the collapsed bridge to the grey reflection on the sea and sky. In the process of establishing digital color palettes for his images, Bendito reconnected in color the different pieces of a fragmented world. In the computer he transformed photographs and videos from the Internet into grids with assigned colors to each of the squares (Page 13.2). As such, it calls to mind Piet Mondrian’s grid of universal order and unity. But Bendito’s grid, at the end, is not orthogonal. In his works the lines move and fold gracefully through vectorial paths that he
(1) CC photo by Claudio Núñez via Wikimedia.org. Color scheme by Petronio Bendito. (2) Color grid study for Chile Earthquake, Concepcion: 2010. CC: Creative Commons
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