Alfonso Piloto Nieves
EL CEO de otros tiempos, 2013
High-fire clay, oxides, high-fire glaze,mirror, acrylic
I am a self-taught artist from Querétaro, México and art has always been the way I express myself. I remember that as an adolescent I wanted to study psychology and art because I was curious about the nature of human behavior. To be honest, I never really liked school that much because I felt that it forced me to follow rules, memorize dates, and learn mathematical formulas that, for me, made no sense. I moved to the United States at the age of 21, but it wasn’t until I turned 24 that I realized that art wasn’t just a hobby, but the best way of expressing what I saw, felt, and experienced – so much so that it became a necessity for me to create art in order to have an inner sense of peace. As I experienced more of the world, my observations of human behavior guided and gave style to my art. I use clay because it is a part of the earth and everything we see around us comes from the earth. The whole universe naturally exists in harmony and it is humans, through their destructive instincts of envy and ambition, who have upset the delicate balance of the universe. I use garbage and recycled materials in my work because they are waste products of human consumption. I took it upon myself to pick up this waste and fuse it with the earth in order to transform it into a lesson for humanity about our potential for creation or destruction. In addition to the material garbage, we have mental garbage that creates chains and vicious cycles that for generations have controlled human behavior. My art can seem dark, surreal, or decadent, but in the darkness there is light, in the surreal a reality, and in the decadent the ability to lift ourselves up and exist in harmony with nature and ourselves. In my opinion, we are all artists at birth because, being a creation ourselves, we have that as our essence. However, as life progresses we lose our inner artists because of criticism and fear that society gives us. For me, a true artist is the person who hasn’t lost memory and uses the emptiness as an opportunity for expression.
I AM American Exhibition 