Ernesto Piloto-Marquez

My name is Ernesto Piloto-Marquez, and I was born in Havana City, Cuba in April 1975. As a child, one of my favorite toys was a crayon carton full of colors. Those crayons were my greatest treasure and escape from the reality of the limitations of my surroundings by allowing me to express myself freely. Throughout my adolescent years, I nurtured the artist within me thinking that I would study Fine Arts someday. I frequently visited art exhibitions and learned how to draw urban settings and landscapes which was my first step into the World of Art. At twenty-one years old, I started studies at the national Culinary Arts School where I got a degree in Culinary Art as a Pastry Chef. Years later, I participated in the Second International Culinary Festival held in Cuba, where more than 35 countries exhibited their culinary artwork. At the festival, I worked in collaboration with a remarkable Cuban sculptor named Ramon Casas mixing every element of Culinary Arts and Fine Arts. All these experiences kept me in touch with my dream of becoming the artist that I am; even though at that time I was just collecting flavors and colors.

A few years later, Ramon Casas tutored me on my final project before I graduated from San Alejandro Fine Arts School, which is the most prestigious and oldest Art School in Cuba. A while after I was accepted at San Alejandro fine Arts School where I combined colors and molded shapes, I finally got the required focused training and expert guidance. After my studies, I moved from surrealism to conceptualism. Each piece of work was a continuing search for new ways to express myself. I participated in several collective exhibitions with school colleagues where my work could stand out with a characteristic, personal touch and value.

Several years later, I became part of the Cuban socio-cultural movement and ultimately paved my way to my true passion, the Arts. My emigration to the U.S.A. in 2007 started a transitional and significant period of adjustment and redefinition of my work and personal life-enriching my views and concepts. I rediscovered charcoal. I chose the woman as an artistic motive, one of my main figures, which a strong fertility symbol, full of sensuality, controlling, beautiful, and defiant. I then combined my motive with different objects and symbols representing contradictions, emotions, and life situations. To sum up, my work is a reflection of this society, the way it lives, the fluid change of its values, thoughts and actions, so my art is always about philosophical questioning used to reflect on the elemental, and at the same time, monumental questions of who we are and where we are headed to.