[More] About Pepe Piedra
by Teresa Diaz, curator
Jose (Pepe) Piedra was born in Casma, Peru, home to the most ancient archeological site in Peru. Because of its historical and spiritual significance and wonderful location on the coast of Peru, Casma has always held a reputation as a cradle of inspiration for artists, writers and philosophers, hence Piedra’s nature. Piedra arrived in the United States a learned visual artist with a degree from the National School of Fine Arts in Lima, and now has become a successful artist and art teacher in a Montessori school in Maryland.
Piedra’s paintings are reminiscent of provincial life in Casma, Peru, in which isolation, purity and solemnity are juxtaposed with a longing for adventure and discovery. They reflect his continual introspection of conflicting feelings as an expatriate and an immigrant -evident in the titles, themes, and symbolism of the objects depicted in his work.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Piedra expresses his inner urges with painting, music and poetry and thus, he enlightens us with his very lyrical transcendent creations. “Resistencia Latina (Latino Resistance),” an homage to the American-Hispanic race, reveals his longing for resistance to American Imperialism, where swans represent the “American way-of-life” and lure us with their beauty and sensuality. However, while enjoying these pleasures, the anaconda, representing danger, is always present and awaiting a careless move in order to attack. Other symbols Piedra creates such as the egg represent the incubation of the Latino presence in this land, ready to hatch and become a majority; the owl, a vigilant creature representing wisdom and knowledge, alerts the lizard, a symbol for the Latino immigrant, of present dangers, but, if hungry, will compete with the lemur, another predator hanging high from the branches, to snatch a prey or two; and the bell, a symbol for warning, alerts us of dangers.
With a metaphorical approach, Piedra uses the Red Man as an alter ego –a humane conscience, a jocular surprise for the spectator, an instigator striving for peace and truth- to give the spectator a momentary divergence between reality and fantasy. The ladder, a metaphor for superiority, evolution, and the striving for perfection that humans long for, inasmuch as the number 7 -a cabala- is a part of Piedra’s magical world.
While “Stop War” and “Secrets” denote a more explicit interpretation of Piedra’s political agenda, his use of collage with newspaper headline cuttings deflect the formal subject while using the foreground as the background, and vice versa, creating symbiotic shapes that become one and many at once. Thus, by using negative space as positive space and words and symbols in the same surface, he creates a narrative that becomes an exemplary characteristic of Piedra’s dialect.