About Patrick Benedictus

Patrick’s work depicts individuals in association with their own behavior, their thinking, their relationships, their religion, their sexuality, their aspirations, their fears, their pain, their happiness.

He is inspired by human beings and the tangible, raw facts of live. His drawings are reflecting on how we interact with each other, with ourselves and the environment. He focuses on the human figure, rendered in a realist manner and imbued with a stark and evocative psychological intensity. His work reveals a limitation how we primarily perceive the world through our eyes and it challenges the choices made in our contemporary Western consumer society, where consumption is ever-growing. Some drawings are highlighting the conceptual isolation and strangeness of the individual.

He has “re-constructed” human existence on paper thus placing them in new and alien content. When things are lifted out of their usual surroundings they pave the way for an ominous silence and sense of uncertainty. In many of these drawings the critical content is seething beneath the surface. He pursues a kind of existentialist realism in his work, exploring the mysteries of human nature and man’s position in the world by studying the relationship between individuals. Many drawings accentuate the ambivalence associated with the human ability to forget and repress things.

Although he brings together visual modes of expression from the realms of art, literature, theatre and music, he is foremost portraying modern life. At the end, he says: “I re-ask the question: “Why are we doing this?”  It is a continuous search for a true meaning in individual and social life in an effort to be reunited with ourselves and our surroundings”.