Gerardo Pontiérr is an innovative Mexican artist who uses thousands of individual LEGO bricks to create incredible works of art, including detailed human portraits.
Gerardo Pontiérr has been using LEGO for as long as he can remember. He first started playing with the colorful plastic bricks when he was only two years old and developed such a passion for it that by age 10 he was already a World Champion LEGO Builder. His interest and love for the Danish-invented building system only grew with age, allowing him to use LEGO to create some truly incredible things. Pontiérr may not be the first to use LEGO as an artistic medium, but he can be credited for taking LEGO art to a whole new level of mastery.
There was a time in Gerardo’s life when his passion for LEGO subsided somewhat and he pivoted towards music, becoming an internationally-known violinist. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he saw most of his events canceled, which meant he had a lot of free time on his hands. That’s when he got back into LEGO, creating the world’s first fully functional LEGO violin. But that was only the beginning.
“Later I started sketching in a three-dimensional sculpture format that hangs on the wall. I started with small works and now I’m taking the technique to levels I never imagined. It’s been a beautiful madness,” Pontiérr told Milenio Magazine. “Over time, I realized that these blocks are not only toys but also powerful tools for telling stories and exploring complex concepts so I decided to incorporate them into my artwork.”
One of the features that sets Gerrardo’s detailed portraits from other similar artworks is their three-dimensional aspect. Seen from the front, they merely seem pixelized, but from the side, you can see all sorts of LEGO bricks and accessories sticking out. It’s this distinctive approach that has earned him many fans among contemporary art lovers.
“I work with a palette of 65 colors that exist within 14 thousand variations of pieces. It’s crazy the amount of shapes and variations that exist in these pieces. And the color palette that I select for each work depends a bit on both the narrative and the pieces that I have,” Gerrardo said, adding that he often has to source the right pieces for his projects from Los Angeles and Europe and have them shipped to his studio in Guadalajara.
Gerardo Pontiérr is not yet a certified LEGO artist but hopes to become the first Latin American artist and only the 23rd person in the world to receive such a certificate.
Each one of Pontiérr’s LEGO portraits numbers thousands of individual pieces expertly stacked on top of each other, so each piece can take months to complete. But all that work results in incredible artworks that many would pay small fortunes to add to their art collections. His pieces are in such high demand that there is currently a long waiting list of art collectors hoping to get their hands on one.
