The way Benítez underscores and intensifies creative operations like montage and assemblage situates his works in the domain of the trial, the tryout, the fitting; an art like that of tacking, when the pieces of a garment are sewn together with visible white thread before the finishing process begins. Tacking, then, is the next-to-last stage; and this somewhat surprising dressmaking analogy sits well with an art that gives rise to sutures, to points of weakness that are the signs of work done, of the item in the process of construction/deconstruction. This is the merely apparent vulnerability of creations which, like the reed, bend with the wind that can topple the mighty oak.

This undisguised fragility enables the artist to give a light, laid-back twist to a notion of construction/deconstruction that could easily have submitted to the artificiality, reversibility and disappearance of things. Transcending of contradictions, intensification, indecisiveness, oscillation, vibration, the art of nuance, the non-willingness to cling: these are some of the essential traits of Barthes's "neutral", which thwarts binary logic and leaves meaning hanging. There are countless affinities between the art of Jesús Alberto Benítez and the intense neutral to which Barthes devoted a course of lectures at the Collège de France. At work in that art is a principle of sensitivity to what is neglected, to what usually goes unheeded, to what, so to speak, we cannot see.