Visual Artist for Vol. 131: Illogical Conclusions
MATEO PIZARRO
Mexico, Mexico
Originally from Columbia, Mateo Pizarro has made a name for himself as a graphite artist with a keen eye for detail. Pizarro’s carefully rendered drawings are nearly photorealistic, but their subject matter exhibits a penchant for the surreal. In one example, a male figure vomits a seemingly endless stream of rabbits into a blank void. Elsewhere, a saintly early-modern figure sits cradling a small robot–the rendering is so exact with a composition so true to familiar images of the Virgin Mary, that it takes a moment for the robot to even register as such. In Pizzaro’s work for this volume, he imagines a series of hybrid creatures that are both fantastical and grotesque–a muscular dog with the head of a chicken, a cycloptic rhino, and an alligator with an abundance of human arms emanating from its torso. The overall effect of this menagerie is both disturbing and engaging, a testament to Pizarro’s perverse sense of humor.