Roberto Benavidez on creating piñatas & "piñathkos"

When I first started with this medium, the piñata one of the first thing I noticed is how translucent the paper is and how you can really play and shift color and there's something about that that allows me to go places I probably wouldn't otherwise.

Here we have a landscape.

Right, yeah I mean, once I started thinking about paper as the equivalent of mixing like you would paint I naturally just started using it in that sense as well.

Instead of covering a 3D object I decided to just make paintings with paper.

Once I started down that road I just fell in love with that technique as well so that kind of expanded.

I started very simply making what I call piñathkos which are a take on Rothko so they're color filled piñatas and from that I kind of just fell in love with the flat surface and using paper to paint.

I consider myself a sculptor so form is what excites me and with this you don't have that so you're not really working to figure out how to fringe the piece so that the fringe flows on a 3D object.

It really is way more about the colors than anything else.

You're able to get sense of depth, a sense of atmosphere.

It's remarkable.

Yeah I mean I think that you can make pretty much any anything with paper at this point.

It's just a matter of will and exploration and probably play.