Pity the piñatas, which are born on death row. The papier-mâché and crepe creations first gained a foothold in Mexican cultural tradition during the sixteenth century, when they served as a Catholic representation of sin. Since then, piñatas have acknowledged that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. When the time comes, they bleed sweetly and without protest.
For these long-suffering sculptures, Roberto Benavidez’s workshop is a sanctuary. Unlike their Party City brethren, Benavidez’s intricate piñata renditions of real and imagined flora and fauna are intended to stick around for the long haul. Influenced by ideas of religion, sexuality and race, his sculptures are rendered with such adroitness they’re barely recognizable as piñatas at all. Or perhaps they’re what piñatas would grow up to be if we humans would just leave them alone.
Trawling the internet a few years ago, I was enthralled by images of the piñata series for which Benavidez is best known: a three-dimensional reimagining of beasts from Hieronymus Bosch’s sixteenth-century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Thousands of painstakingly layered, gleaming paper pieces comprise the fins, fur and feathers of fantastical creatures, which, in a reversal of the piñata’s typical fate, appear on the cusp of life instead of death. Instinctively, I wondered what they might contain, the way a lion might fantasize about an antelope. Most piñatas know they are intact only by our mercy. Benavidez’s works, however, with all their otherworldly drama, seem so conscious that their fate seems entirely up to them. Through luminous eyes, his piñatas leer at us, knowing their secrets are theirs alone.