Colombia-born, Miami-based conceptual artist Federico Uribe uses objects from daily life to construct life-size sculptural figures. His medium of choice? Pencils. Although most artists use pencils as a tool for sketching illustrations, Uribe utilizes multicolored pencils fastened together with plastic zip-ties to create a nuclear family–father, mother, son, and daughter–in his series entitled Pencilism: Sculptures.
The multifaceted artist has also employed the ordinary drawing utensils to create massive and elaborate paintings in his collection called Pencilism: Paintings. The multihued sticks are cut and tightly situated against each other. The “paintings” are somewhat sculptural in their construction with tips and edges of the color pencils sticking out. There is a remarkable texture added to the images because of the elements used and their assembly. Uribe’s ability to produce the large-scale works with such an ordinary object, redefining its use, is truly astonishing. The amount of time taken to build each piece also seems unfathomable to me.
