In Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych painted between 1490 and 1510, we see bizarre animals mingling with disrobed men and women, some placidly splashing in the water, others engaged in amorous activities, and yet others taking bites of giant red fruits. It’s an enigmatic masterpiece that has been interpreted as either the ultimate romp or a cautionary tale against ​​sin. One wouldn’t expect to see its images, conceived by a Dutchman in the late Middle Ages, turned into a piñata—those papier-mâché candy containers often seen at kids’ birthday parties—but that’s exactly what Los Angeles–based artist Roberto Benavidez has been doing for more than a decade.

One of his recent sculptures, 2023’s Stigmata Piñata, focuses on a small vignette of the famous painting: a young boy lying on the grass with one leg up, a bird perched on his raised foot, and a plump berry in one hand. Benavidez’s three-dimensional creation looks almost exactly like Bosch’s composition, except he substitutes the fruit with a Mexican-style seven-pointed star, intentionally creating a cultural mashup.

“I think of the hybrid creatures in this painting as a subtle reference to myself being mixed-race,” he says. “As a sculptor, I get so much joy in re-creating them in 3D form. I really like the balance between cute and scary in them. That being said, there is also this religious parallel between the piñata and the theme of the painting that connects the two.”

Benavidez grew up in a small town in South Texas, in an area where “art wasn’t a thing.” He was raised Catholic by his mother, who is white, and his father, who was born in Texas but identifies as Mexican. As a young boy, he remembers going to Mass and being much more interested in the visuals of the church than in religion itself. “That may be where I developed my medieval aesthetic,” he says, tongue in cheek.

While Benavidez’s piñatas are meant to be kept intact, he has broken a couple of them on special occasions. For the opening of his 2019 solo exhibition at the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara, titled Piñatas of Earthly Delights, he hung an eight-foot-tall black birdlike creature from a tall brise soleil outside the museum’s entrance and allowed attendees to take swings at it. Eventually, candy and confetti fell out, to raucous cheers.

“I don’t know of another art form where people wonder what’s inside,” he says. “I always add little things that make noise; I like the intrigue it causes.”

The first of Benavidez’s piñatas that caught a gallery’s eye was a bright sugar skull made in 2009, but it wasn’t until 2017, when Hi-Fructose magazine wrote about him, that his career took off. Since then, his works have been shown in various cultural institutions and museums, including the aforementioned AD&A, the Fuller Craft Museum, and the Mingei International Museum. In December, he appeared in an episode of PBS’s Craft in America.

To make his sculptures, Benavidez starts with a balloon or series of balloons, either round or oblong, depending on the desired final shape, and uses them to form the core of his piece, wrapping them in paperboard and a pH-balanced glue to create a papier-mâché structure. Then begins a very labor-intensive process of giving it color and detail. Using an acid-free crepe paper from Italy that comes in myriad hues, he stacks several long strips together, glues them on one end, and then cuts into these multicolored strips to create a serrated edge. The result is a trademark style that makes each piece look like it’s covered in paper feathers.

When asked how long it typically takes to finish a piece, he says, “long enough,” and explains that he doesn’t time it for fear of getting discouraged. “I put in eight-hour days,” he adds, showing over FaceTime several unfinished pieces in his LA studio, which occupies a room inside the home he shares with his husband.

Being part of the LGBTQ community has informed Benavidez’s work just as much as his mixed heritage. Both of these identities are clearly reflected in his Paper Bird and Birdr series, which include a “half-breed” creature with a hummingbird silhouette, the colors of a phoenix, and the tail feathers of a peacock—as well as a pair of robins, both with male plumage, performing a courting ritual.

After a wildlife magazine did a story on his papier-mâché birds, Benavidez was flooded with commission requests. “People who love birds, love birds,” he quips. That doesn’t mean he’ll be abandoning his exploration of Bosch’s work, nor of another fascination, the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated manuscript from the 1300s depicting rural scenes in medieval England, which inspired him to make a series of fantastical-looking metallic-hued animals.

As vibrant as these sculptures are, they are also fragile, and it’s likely that the intensity of their colors will fade after several years (even indoor fluorescent light can degrade paper dyes). “If well taken care of, they can last for a lifetime, but some have already faded a considerable amount,” he says. It’s bittersweet to think of an artist’s work as transitory, especially when we see the lasting relevance of a painting like The Garden of Earthly Delights, created more than 500 years ago. But Benavidez has made peace with his chosen medium. “They are ephemeral. I’m fine with that.”

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