Objects with a Heartbeat: Shirley Villavicencio Pizango’s Living Art

Shirley Villavicencio Pizango doesn’t paint to please — she paints to feel. Her portraits thrum with life: bold, sensual, defiantly human. Faces emerge in vivid layers of pink, ochre, and emerald; proportions bend, perspectives dissolve. It’s less depiction, more emotion — a vibrant refusal of perfection.

Now, the Belgian-Peruvian artist is expanding her visual universe beyond the canvas. In collaboration with Serax, the Belgian design house known for its poetic functionalism, she’s turned her painted forms into tangible objects — vessels that seem to breathe. The collection, Santiago de Borja, translates the wild grace of her paintings into ceramics that are as alive as they are beautiful.

Each piece carries the warmth of the tropics and the honesty of the hand. The curves are organic, asymmetrical, painted in bold strokes that evoke the energy of the Amazon. Santiago de Borja is named after the small Peruvian village where Shirley spent her childhood summers — a place of deep roots and humid air, where color and life seem inseparable. “It feels like people are entering my world through this collection,” she says. “It’s where I reconnect with nature.”

The collection is more than décor; it’s a manifesto for imperfection. In an era of digital gloss and mass-produced sameness, these vases stand out for their humanity. Each one bears the trace of the artist’s gesture, the warmth of her touch — small irregularities that make them unique. “Some pieces aren’t logical in form,” she admits, “but that’s what makes them alive.”

Villavicencio Pizango is part of a new generation of artists redefining beauty — not as flawlessness, but as authenticity. Her work merges ancestral memory with modern freedom, the feminine with the fierce. It’s a meeting of worlds: Lima and Antwerp, art and design, heart and hand.

Through her collaboration with Serax, she brings art closer to everyday life — a kind of democratic intimacy. “Sometimes you can’t afford an artist’s painting,” she says. “But when they create an accessible object, you can still bring a part of their world home.”

To live with a Santiago de Borja piece is to live with her pulse — the rhythm of rainforests and laughter, of longing and light. These are not static objects. They’re living witnesses of color, form, and emotion.

Because for Shirley Villavicencio Pizango, art isn’t just something you see.
It’s something you feel, hold, and breathe with.
www.serax.com