Pedro Ipiña
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Pedro Antonio Ipiña (Born 1956) is one of El Salvador's most celebrated living artists, having gained international recognition capturing the spirituality of life by painting the harsh reality of his country history and its people in a beautiful mysterious world of magic dreams where the fantasy of a drawn poem or a fairy tale story deeply captivate us.
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[edit] History
Born in El Salvador, Pedro Ipina is of Mayan and Spanish heritage and counts the adventurer “el negro Ipiña” (the black Ipiña) as one of his ancestors who came to America, for purposes of adventure, in the late 1500 from the Basque Country via Mexico.
Although Ipiña began his apprenticeship with the masters of the “Valera Lecha” school in his hometown and studied architectural drawing, his upbringing was marked by lack of traditional art venues such as museums a and formal fine art education.
although Ipiña has been painting prolifically since the 1982, early in his career he was first recruited by the Master Carlos Cañas to help in the cupola mural of the El Salvador National Theater. Except for his earliest works, his style since the 80’s has varied slightly. He has worked independently ever since.
Mr. Ipina exhibits all over the world: Tokyo, Santo Domingo, Jerusalem, Tegucigalpa, Washington D.C, Guatemala City, Boston and Miami just to name a few museum showings. His paintings, which sell from $2,000 to $10,000, are held in hundreds of public and private collections all over the world.
His painting “El Rey David” hangs in the museum adorning the tomb of King David on Mount Zion.
His work has been bestowed with numerous international honors, including the government of Japan in the Salvadorean Pavillon in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the Secretary General of Venezuela (90’s), the President of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria (1998) in Washington, D.C., the government of Israel through the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (1999), the Consulate of El Salvador in Boston, Massachusetts (2004) and the Gallery Punto Convergente de las Artes representing the Bush-Clinton Fund (2005) in San Salvador during the fundraising auction for the victims of hurricane Katrina.
Pedro Antonio Ipiña is married to Esperanza Orellana and has a son, Peter and two daughters Esperanza and Tridene who all are also artists.
[edit] Theory
His Salvadorean heritage informs his art. It makes him a protagonist of its history. Wandering the streets of his neighborhood in the Salvadorian city where he lives or elsewhere, he interviews the children and listens to their dreams, the difficult and painful subject matter of poverty, transforming them in his canvas into a world of peaceful existence, of dreams, of light, of beauty, of hope.
Although, the horrific facts and consequences, the absurdity of the violence of the Salvadorian civil war may perhaps have been plastered in canvas by other artists, Ipiña refuses to concede his art to an expression of the cruelty of a brutal history and the horrors of the urban relentless violence that still plague his country. For him, the matter of history belongs to the history books. He wants to create a better world, as he says “a new heaven and a new earth where we all can live in peace and harmony”.
[edit] Praxis
Color has always played an essential role in his work, both on an affective level and as a unifying element of the composition. His painting are an explosion of light that comes from a background of mythical shadows, the glare of his brush populated by signs and symbols, galactic birds, innocent sweet indigenous faces, and dreams come true full of gorgeous, random objects that shed light on the mysteries of the soul.
The paintings for which he is best known and admired are most often an integration of human reality and dreams with a strong "ethereal" presence related to the literally school of magic realism in Latin America which is the reminiscent of the land in which García Márquez the Colombian winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, set the imaginary town in his “100 years of Solitude”. He has achieved a pictographic system of his own invention, marked by his personal formal, mystical, and chromatic symbolisms; exploring the subconscious realm of magic-surrealist terrains that suggest the recesses of an overflowing imagination searching through cultural histories, and the unknown for enlightenment.
