Peruvian Folk Artist Says His Work Tells ‘The Story Of My Life’

By S. Lynne Walker

A child is crying, frightened by the death around him. Car tires and a bumper and steering wheel are scattered across the ground, destroyed by a car bomb.  Soldiers toss peasant farmers, their hands tied behind their backs, from moving trucks. A paramedic from the Red Cross watches helplessly as victims lie bleeding at his feet.

“This is the story of my life,” said artist Claudio Jimenez Quispe, whose exquisite work recounts the Maoist-inspired Shining Path insurgency and its 20-year war with the Peruvian government which left 70,000 dead. “This is what I have seen with my own eyes. This is my personal history.”

Jimenez, a 52-year-old Peruvian folk artist born in the Andes, exhibited his detailed and delicate “retablos” during an Oct. 27 Cepas event at the Institute of the Americas. His rustic wooden boxes are painted with scenes from Peru. Inside the boxes, Jimenez places scores of tiny figures to tell stories of life and death, the past and the future, the beauty and the tragedy of Peru.

“I was born in the world of retablos,” the soft-spoken Jimenez told an audience of 100 during the exhibition. “When I was 4 or 5 years old, I started helping my father make retablos.”

Jimenez explained that the origins of retablos date to the Spanish conquerors, who brought with them small altars that contained the figures of saints.

Centuries later, in the 1940s, a movement developed among Peru’s folk artists, who decided “retablos did not have to be religious, they could also be cultural.”

“That is my kind of retablo,” Jimenez said.

The names of his retablos tell their stories. The Shoe Shop is filled with leather workers making colorful women’s shoes. Judgment Day is populated with angels and devils. My Peru tells of the country’s natural resources and its cultural history, replete with swirling dancers and farmers harvesting a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables.

The materials that Jimenez uses to craft his magnificent art are the humble materials of the Peruvian countryside. His tools are nothing more than toothpicks and paint brushes. His tiny figures are fashioned from potatoes mixed with plaster, then reinforced with wire and glue. Finally, Jimenez paints them, using the vibrant colors of Latin America.

A math teacher by profession, Jimenez has been recognized by the Congress of Peru, which awarded him a medal for his unique art.

Jimenez has exhibited his work in Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, as well as in Spain and Israel. His visit to the Institute of the Americas was his last stop on a U.S. tour that took him to Nebraska, and the California cities of Sacramento and Petaluma. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University and the House of Peru in Balboa Park, which prepared a traditional dish – arroz con pollo – and served pisco sours.

Jimenez and his brothers began to fashion small figures as they were tending sheep in pastures high in the Andes. Jimenez’s father soon put him to work repairing damaged, centuries-old statutes of saints in Catholic churches.

“What you learn as a child is how to copy,” Jimenez said. “When you study, you begin to see the universal story of art and your mind opens to new ideas.”

As the young Jimenez developed his own ideas and used them in his father’s retablos, the family won recognition for its folk art. But all the honors and awards bore only the name of his father, which bothered Jimenez so much that he told his father he would no longer work with him.

“When I left him, my father cried because he said he was being left without his arms and his hands,” he said.

At the age of 12, Jimenez won his first contest. “That was very important for me. I still have my certificate,” he said.

Four decades later, Jimenez is still perfecting his work in a studio outside Lima, Peru, called, “La Voz del Retablo.” Accompanied by his wife, four children and brother-in-law, Jimenez continues to tell his story through his art.

“I have dominated the technique. I have dominating the painting. I am still working on dominating the subjects,” he said. “People call me Maestro. But I say, ‘Don’t call me Maestro.’ I am learning every day.”