This site is devoted to displaying and promoting the digitally-visualized contemporary artwork of John de Clef Piñeiro, a life-long native New Yorker.  Although an attorney by profession, he traces his earliest exposure to drawing, working in clay, and photography, back to his childhood, as the son of a Puerto Rican immigrant commercial artist.  He later studied portrait photography with famed Life magazine portrait photographer Philippe Halsman.

 

His conceptual themes are concerned with capturing and presenting the extraordinary in the ordinary, and with producing works that are premised on the inherent limitations of human perception and our subjective incapacity to grasp and experience wholeness.  The resulting gaps in human cognition allow room for the enigmatic and ambiguous, which are a continuing thematic inspiration for many of his works and often prompt the query from the viewer: "what is it?"  It is a question he chooses never to answer, believing, instead, that what genuinely matters most is maintaining the mystery and cognitive tension between the viewer and the work in order to tease and elicit meaning from the viewing public.  Significantly, this allows viewers to engage and "bond" with a work, and, in effect, get to "own" the work through the personalized attribution of meaning.