CRITICAL REVIEW

        His work attracts by authenticity, communicative force and, more often than not, humour. In his mitho-poetics - in which man is always present - there are two types of heroes: real mythical heroes and antiheroes. These two types of heroes show a deep connection between the sculptor’s expression of reality and the deep substrata of the traditional Transylvanian village ethos. His creation comes from the traditional civilization; his motives can be subsumed to the ballad, to the oldman’s story, to the tale or to the moralizing proverb. If in the works he makes in stone or wood the motives he applies refer to a mythical ethnic tone (portraits, monumental statuary composition) while the heroes live their community destiny, in the works from terracotta (portraits and compositions), the anti heroes live a personal destiny, bordering grotesque and burlesque, satire and humour, usually moralizing. Beyond the genre, the material or the motive, we see the artist’s refusal to remain at artistic formulas pre-established by the academia or the ideology. In Benczédi’s sculpture there is a deep need for succinct characterization, a natural corollary of concentration, of affirmation within the frames of an universe or of a generosity and wisdom that include his good quality humour. His work is based on plastic synthesis, aiming to underline the "characteristic", the "expressive" and sometimes the "vital". Markos Andras, author of a monography about Benczédi, as well as other exegetes (V. Drăguţ, M. Ţoca) consider that the most valuable part of his work is that done in terracotta; his compositions in clay have a specific architecture of shapes and movements realised not by reproducing reality, but by purifying her expressively - by creating a new reality, capable of sublimating the sad or grotesque aspects, usually by a beneficial, cleansing sense of humour.  The virtuosity of Benczédi Sándor display in these works the entire value of his authentic and singular artistic vision. 

Alexandra Rus