This artist turned an eye injury into his signature style ┃ Benjamin Casiano

At Arts to Hearts Project, our Magazine Issue 12 with the theme This Is Me brought us artists from every kind of background and every kind of practice. But sometimes This Is Me is not a long story.

Sometimes it is one image. One symbol. One unmistakable mark that you could spot across a crowded room and know exactly who made it. Benjamin Casiano has that mark. And the story behind how he found it is not what you would expect.

Benjamin is one of our selected artists for this issue. He is based in the US and he makes work he calls pop-cubism, a term he coined himself because nothing that already existed described what he was doing.

Bold geometric shapes, vibrant colour, acrylic on canvas, and a recurring one-eyed figure that has become his trademark and his alter ego and the most recognisable element across everything he creates.

Before painting took over, Benjamin studied at Pratt in Brooklyn and spent years working as a creative director and designer. He had a whole career in the commercial creative world. Good work that paid the bills and used his skills.

But painting was always the first love. It was always there underneath everything else waiting for the moment he would come back to it fully. What finally made that shift happen and why he needed to feel more connected to his art than design was allowing him to be is something he gets into during the conversation.

His paintings start from real people. Real gestures captured in a moment. He takes those poses and transforms them through his own geometric language until they become something entirely his. Not portraits exactly. Not symbols exactly. Something in between that feels both specific and universal at the same time.

He has work in private and corporate collections across the US, Europe, and Asia. And his attitude toward where his paintings end up is refreshingly simple and honest. No pretension about it. Just a genuine desire for people to enjoy the work for years to come wherever it happens to hang.

Let’s get to know Benjamin through our conversation with him about the eye injury that became a trademark, why he left a design career for painting, what pop-cubism actually means, and why finding your own style is the only goal that matters.

Q1. How would you describe yourself as an artist and the ideas behind your signature style?

My work is considered pop-cubism, and the one eye is due to my eye injury.

Q2. You studied at Pratt and built a career in design, what ultimately brought you back to painting?

I needed to feel more connected to my art something that has always been there from the beginning.

Q3. Your signature style blends pop art & cubism, how did that visual language come together over time?

I tried various things to help me reach my goal. I feel it is the goal of every artist to fine there own style that makes them identifiable.

 Q4.You work in acrylic with bold color and geometric forms, what keeps drawing you to acrylic as your medium?

I enjoy the fact that it dries quickly. It makes it easy to ship or store away.

Q5. When did the one-eyed figure first appear, and what did it represent to you?

A situation that became fortuitous from an unfortunate eye injury. I consider it my trademark. They start from.

Q6. Your paintings often feel like stylized portraits do you see them as representations of real individuals, or more symbolic figures?

I start with people’s gestures that might have been captured in a moment in time. I take their pose and transform them in my own interpretation.

Q7. Your goal is to create something “not seen in modern-day culture” what does originality mean to you today?

I loved art most of my life, but it is important to eventually find the style that will identify who you are as an artist.

Q8. Your work is collected around the world does it feel different knowing a painting hangs in Seoul rather than New York?

I just want all individuals to enjoy the work for many years to come, regardless of where it is on display.

Q9. Looking ahead, what directions or ideas are you most excited to explore in your work?

I hope to do more commissions and larger paintings. Perhaps collaborations with other artists

Q10. What advice would you give to someone who’s finally ready to leave a stable career and put art first?

Keep painting here and there. Never stop pursuing your goals. You have one life. You might as well shoot for the moon but if you miss, you always have the stars.

As our conversation with Benjamin came to a close, we kept thinking about identity. Not in the abstract conceptual way that word usually gets used in the art world. In the practical way. As in, do people know it is yours the moment they see it?

Because that is what Benjamin has achieved. You see one of his paintings across a room and you know who made it. The one-eyed figure, the geometric forms, the bold colour, the pop-cubism language he built from scratch. It is unmistakably his. And in a world where a lot of art looks like a lot of other art, that recognisability is worth more than most artists realise.

But here is the part that stayed with us. He did not find that identity by following a formula or studying what was trending or trying to reverse-engineer what the market wanted. He found it through something that happened to him personally. An eye injury. Something that most people would just call bad luck and move on from.

Benjamin turned it into the centrepiece of his entire visual language. The thing that makes his work his and nobody else’s came from a moment of real vulnerability and real pain. And he did not dress it up or make it dramatic. He just absorbed it into his practice and kept painting.

That is a lesson that goes way beyond Benjamin’s specific story. That the things that happen to you, especially the difficult ones, are not interruptions to your creative life. They are material. The experiences you wish you had not had, the setbacks, the injuries, the years spent doing something that was not quite right, all of it can become part of what makes your work uniquely yours if you are willing to let it in instead of hiding it.

And his years in design were not wasted either. The compositional strength in his paintings, the boldness of his colour choices, the clarity of his visual communication, all of that was trained into him during years of commercial creative work.

He brought those skills with him when he finally gave painting the centre stage it had been waiting for. Nothing was lost. Everything was preparation.

For anyone looking to collect Benjamin’s work, his paintings bring an immediate energy into any space they enter. The colour is bold, the compositions are striking, and the pop-cubism style has a graphic impact that works equally well in a living room or a corporate setting. But beyond the visual punch there is a personal story embedded in every piece, a signature that is not just stylistic but autobiographical.

That combination of strong visual identity and genuine personal meaning is what makes work hold its value over time. These are paintings that you will recognise instantly and that will keep telling you something about resilience and originality every time you look at them.

Follow Benjamin Casiano through the links below and see what happens when someone turns an injury into an identity and an identity into art that nobody else could make.