José Bento

José Bento, 1962, Salvador, BA, Brazil.
Lives and works in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.
The will of being an artist inhabits José Bento since his childhood. Autodidact, from a bag of popsicle sticks has arisen, around the age of twenty years, the idea of building his first object: a chair in natural size, made of these wood fragments, material he never abandoned. Since then, he creates a series of environments in miniature, showed in his first solo exhibition at Palácio das Artes, in Belo Horizonte, in 1989. By this time, he starts to explore the possibilities of wood in other scales and shapes by means of his work with naturally fallen trunks, many of rare and secular trees, collected at the Mata Atlântica region between Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo.
His recent works seek to overcome the formal limits of sculpture and matter. He plays with architecture through silent interventions, constructs and deconstructs objects, creates interactive installations, works with photographs, performances and videos, looking for reinventing places to materials such as wood, porcelain and glass.