What Happens When You Build a Hundred Kites

Luis Pablo, one of Oaxaca’s most distinctive alebrije artists.

There is a candle painted beside every signature Luis Pablo Mendoza places on his alebrijes. He draws it there because a candle, he believes, belongs on a high place where its light can reach the whole room, a conviction he traces back to a Bible passage his mother read aloud to him as a child in Oaxaca.
Every figure Luis Pablo sends into the world is meant to illuminate something. He hopes you place it somewhere that matters to you.
That particularity, specific and personal and fully thought through, runs through everything he makes. Collectors who find him tend to stay loyal for decades.

From Carpenter’s Son to Master Sculptor 

Luis Pablo was born on June 21, 1970, in a neighborhood just outside the center of Oaxaca City. His father Martín was a carpenter; his mother María, a homemaker. He was the youngest of ten children and the family had very little. There were no toys. So Luis Pablo repaired broken ones he found in the street, with play dough, wires, rubber bands, orange peels, whatever he could find.

At eight years old he carved a Venus de Milo out of a piece of chalk.

When he wanted a kite, he built one. Then he built a hundred more until he got it right.

He wanted to be an engineer but he had to leave school early and spent years in jobs that never fit: car body shop assistant, house painter, DMV procedures middleman, cell phone seller. None of it was his.

In 1993, a nephew working in an Oaxacan handicrafts store told him about monos, the wooden animal figures that were selling well.

Luis Pablo had never heard of alebrijes. He borrowed his father’s machete and an old pocket knife he had found, and carved his first puppies. He took them to downtown Oaxaca. Every store said no.
He kept going.

The long road to recognition

The early years were a gauntlet. Stores asked for his name before even glancing at his pieces. Unknown meant unwanted.
Then, one afternoon, an American trader wandered past his home studio, lost apparently, since Luis Pablo lived nowhere near the artisan neighborhoods, peered through the window, and ended up buying twelve figures on the spot.

That money bought the first real paints and brushes.
A woman named Rocky Behr, who owned a folk art shop in the United States, was the first person to tell him his work had potential. Then came Carol Cross and Steve Custer from Chicago, who not only bought his pieces but photographed them and promoted his work to gallery owners. That opened the door.

By September 1997, a customer brought him a book, Arte Popular, Cinco Siglos de Tradición Artesanal, with one of his baboons printed inside, and news that his work was on display at the Colegio de San Ildefonso museum in Mexico City.

An accident along the way sharpened everything. A bad cut to his hand forced Luis Pablo to switch from heavy blades to very fine, very sharp ones that required precision rather than force. He carved a dragon during his recovery. Cross and Custer, when they saw it, wanted to know which gallery was representing him. No gallery. Just Luis

What makes his work different

In the alebrije world, division of labor is standard. One artist carves. Another paints. In some workshops, pieces pass through many hands before a single name gets signed on them. Luis Pablo does none of that.
Every figure he makes, from the first chisel cut in copal wood to the last detail painted on, is made by him alone. His production is limited because of it. Collectors who buy his work know exactly what they own: a piece that holds, as he puts it, a part of his soul.
His designs are nearly always original. He creates because staying ahead of repetition is what keeps the work alive. When he does repeat a piece, it is because a collector asked him to.
Innovation is genuinely hard. Five truly new pieces in a month is a real achievement. He watches National Geographic. He studies the stances and gestures of animals. He thinks about his next figure at odd hours of the night and then wakes up in the morning and puts his hands to work.
He is also, by choice, independent. Luis Pablo does not live in San Martín Tilcajete or Arrazola, the woodcarving towns that draw most visitors to Oaxacan folk art. He works alone, outside the artisan associations and the government grant systems. This has cost him visibility. But it has given him creative freedom and a body of work that looks like no one else’s.

Dragons, baboons, and dancing anteaters
Ask Luis Pablo which figures he loves most and he will tell you: dragons. Every one is different from the last. He is always improving them, always approaching them from a new angle. His most requested pieces are baboons and raccoons, his classics, his reliable signatures, but the range is wide. A collector in Norway once traveled to Oaxaca specifically to commission a dancing anteater. Luis Pablo tells that story with obvious pleasure.

His pieces have traveled to Germany, Japan, Spain, the United States, and beyond. They are held in museum collections. He is invited to demonstrate his techniques in Mexico and internationally. He has begun working in other media, clay and painting, and says he will present new work when the time is right.

The artist behind the candle

Luis Pablo is not sentimental about the difficulty of what he has built. He had no training, no connections, no gallery, no artisan community.

He built a reputation figure by figure, customer by customer, over years of rejection. When the 2001 economic downturn following 9/11 cut off his most important US buyers, he struggled. When his marriage fell apart at the same time, his creativity went with it for a while. He is honest about that.

Today he is in a good place. He has a partner, Reyna. He watches his children Benjamin and Denisse grow up. He does not keep any of his pieces. He sells them all. Keeping them for himself, when someone else could have them, would feel selfish.

The artists he admires most are Manuel Jiménez, Isidoro Cruz, and Abad Xuana, the founding figures of the alebrije movement, because their work has purity. He tries to carry some of that forward.

His figures are meant to illuminate your home. He hopes you put them somewhere high, somewhere that means something. That is the whole point of the candle.