Roldán Pinedo (Yarinacocha, Peru, 1971), is a Shipibo artist currently living in the community of Cantagallo in Lima. His name in the Shipibo language, Shoyan Shëca, has been inherited from his grandfather and means restless mouse. Through painting, the artist displays the multiple elements of the Shipibo-Conibo culture and its fundamental values. In this sense, he also delves into a relationship of balanced symbiosis with nature through the understanding that all natural elements: men, animals, plants, rivers or stones, belong to this common organism and that they all have the same value.

Pinedo highlights, for example, the importance of plants as mechanisms of connection with deities, healing and access to higher thought. Trees painted in vibrant colors and exuberant forms refer to a reverie of the ancestral spirits they enclose. The trees, their leaves and fruits, hold the knowledge of healing disease, sustenance and protection of the earth. The animals, spirits of equal importance, are also prominently represented, paying homage to their forms and their fundamental presence in the balance of a complex system. The immaterial understanding of these values is intimately linked to an ecological knowledge about food chains, pollination and preservation of resources in nature. Roldán Pinedo’s oneiric universe operates in the construction of these ideas, at the same time that it refers to free plastic exercises, with marked tones and contrasts, brushstrokes of containment and movement, and forms shaped from the instructive and at the same time intuitive.

Roldán Pinedo also carries out his artistic practice based on nostalgia and resistance, from the outskirts of Lima. Cantagallo is the largest urban community of the Shipibo-Conibo and arose after the displacement of people in the face of external pressures from their traditional communities of origin. Once they entered the urban world, the uprooting has translated into marginality, deprivation and oppression. The artist, in this sense, tries to represent dreams, memories and myths as elements of an alternative epistemology, of ancestral knowledge and, with it, the alternative possibilities of learning and intercultural dialogue.

Pinedo has had several solo exhibitions in Lima, in addition to having participated in group exhibitions in Denmark, Ecuador, Brazil, France, the United States, Ireland, Japan, with special mention to the Amazonías project, presented at MATADERO Madrid in 2019. His work belongs to international private collections, as well as permanent collections of institutions such as the Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt, Germany), Museo de Arte del Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Perú and Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, all in Lima.