Groomed Balloons
Roberto Benavidez’s series of abstract piñatas use surreal, sensual, and eerie imagery (image: Roberto Benavidez).
The form poses like a model in a magazine: back curved, head popped over its shoulder, gaze coyly angled downwards. It has voluptuous haunches, globular legs, and pink fur with silver tips and a black undercoat. Its face is one slick eyeball, with lashes curling inwards towards a star-shaped iris.
“With anything I make, I try to just make it come alive,” artist Roberto Benavidez says. His series of abstract piñatas use shapes inspired by experimenting with configurations of balloons layered with papier-mâché. “A lot of the time I see a human form or a gesture in it, and it becomes abstract figurative,” he says. Another piñata from the series looks like a bulbous pregnant worm, while another has an arrow-shaped face like a cat in profile, paired with a swishy electric blue tail. Each one is covered in Benavidez’s signature fringe, which is made out of layers of crepe paper that are cut into feather shapes and glued onto the forms one by one to create a sleek effect that resembles seal fur. “It’s like a groomed coat,” he says.
Abstract piñata No.7 and N0.12, which are shaped like voluptuous worms (image: Roberto Benavidez).
Benavidez was originally drawn to making piñatas because the materials are cheap. “When I started, I just pulled stuff from the recycling to make what I wanted,” he explains. But he became hooked after learning about the history of piñatas, which are believed to have originated in China, with Marco Polo bringing the practice to Europe in the Middle Ages, where it became part of Lent celebrations. Spanish missionaries introduced the piñata to the Americas in the 16th century, where it merged with Mesoamerican traditions that involved breaking clay pots filled with treasure. “The piñata was used as a conversion tool,” Benavidez says, explaining that traditional star-shaped piñatas have seven points to represent the deadly sins. “That was interesting to me because being gay and growing up Catholic, sin has always been on my mind – to a lot of people, I am the embodiment of sin, and I can’t escape it, I just am that.”
His piñatas toy with sexuality through series such as Birdr, which depict scenes of male birds sharing food and cavorting with each other, with its title referencing the hookup app Grindr. “We live in a default heterosexual world,” Benavidez says. “So in my creative world, it's default gay.” Benavidez’s work is intentionally subtle, mirroring the covert ways in which people have communicated queerness throughout history. “I love the idea of an extremely homophobic couple seeing my bird couplings and falling in love with them, taking them home and creating a bond with them,” he says. “I think of it like a Trojan Horse – putting something gay in someone’s house, whether they know it or not, I think it still has some effect.” While the abstract series is not intentionally sexual, the rounded and elongated balloon shapes can appear suggestive; one piñata in particular looks like a triumphant sex toy with golden fur flecked with confetti. “I didn’t actually think about it being phallic at all,” Benavidez says. “But once I saw the resemblance, I didn’t change it.”
A piñata from Benavidez’s series depicting creatures from Hieronymus Bosch artworks (image: Roberto Benavidez).
The intriguing forms of the abstract piñatas also build upon Benavidez’s previous work depicting monsters which were doodled in the margins of medieval manuscripts or creatures which peek out of the backgrounds of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. “When I first started working with the piñata, they were really cracking down on trademarks with piñata makers here in the US,” he says. “They would literally do raids and confiscate all the Disney piñatas in LA.” To evade trademarks and challenge ideas of what a piñata can be, Benavidez turned to these medieval monsters, creating piñatas with a human-like torso and the legs of a lobster, or a beast with a swan’s neck, rabbit ears and devilish red hooves. “They can sometimes be really cute and cuddly but extremely eerie just because they don’t have any limbs or something,” he says. His abstract piñatas contain imagery which is similarly surreal and uncanny, such as a pot-bellied form balanced on claw-shaped legs.
Abstract piñata No.5 (image: Roberto Benavidez).
“I was really drawn to these hybrid creatures which parallel that mixed race part of myself,” Benavidez says, explaining his affinity with medieval artwork. “When I was growing up in south Texas in the 70s and 80s, it was a very racist time and place, and it really did feel like Mexicans were second-tier citizens.” Benavidez presents his work in a fine art context in order to challenge the perception of Mexican labour and Mexican crafts as cheap and disposable. “I wanted to push the piñata into a realm where you’re forced to see it as valuable,” he says. “I want to move the piñata into different spaces to show that we belong everywhere.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown