Check Out Pedro Cuni’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Pedro Cuni.

Hi Pedro, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
“Encaustic,” a beeswax-based paint, was lost at the fall of the Roman Empire, but its mystique increased through the centuries as many sought to rediscover the original formula of “one of the most beautiful materials ever created to produce art.” The magnitude of the quest and the failure to yield results has led many historians and conservationists to believe that encaustic never existed and that the classic paintings were, in fact, frescoes or egg tempera, even though these materials were not mentioned in the ancient texts. 

Fascinated by the beauty of classical artists and the writings of classical historians from Herodotus to Pliny, Leonardo da Vinci embarked on a 30-year quest to find the formula for encaustic. In 1505, just when he thought he had found it, he began painting one of his most famous murals, “The Battle of Anghiari.” However, the paint soon fell from the wall, and he had to abandon the piece. 

For centuries, people have admired the exquisite beauty of Greco-Roman paintings, marveling at how the brightness and color vibrancy have endured through the years. 

In 1960, my father, painter Jose Cuní, became fascinated with the mystery of encaustic and joined the quest to find the formula for this coveted paint. With a grant from the March Foundation, Cuní traveled to Pompeii to start the investigation. Through the years, he found himself encountering Indiana Jones-like adventures and bizarre labyrinths of bureaucracy. Jose Cuní’s great intuition and renaissance curiosity drove his investigation, and ultimately, he found an answer. Cuní recreated the formula and immediately began using it in his own work, finding the old formula to work strikingly well. Jose Cuní’s work can be found in the MOMA, New York, The Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Queen Sophia Museum in Madrid. 

However, hard chemical analysis and scientific proof are needed to further validate that the formula is consistent with that used in the original ancient paintings. 

I decided to take on the task of proving it, as this could be the most important discovery in art history. I am an artist, not a chemist, so it took me a while to figure out the process. It took 25 years of retranslating ancient texts with experts in ancient Greek and Latin languages, reading every single study about Greek and Roman painting and painting materials published or unpublished since the Renaissance, years of developing methods of chemical analysis of ancient paint samples, and the analysis of Roman paint samples carried out at the chemistry department of Cooper Union University. And an infinite number of bureaucratic and political problems. All my efforts paid off, and I was able to prove scientifically that my father’s formula and the one used by ancient Greeks and Romans were exactly the same. 

Finally, in 2012, the Royal Academy of Chemistry, through its journal “Analytical Methods,” published my complete research on ancient encaustic. 

Now, I combine my artistic career with a small company that produces encaustic paint using the exact ancient Greco-Roman formula. It is the first new paint medium for artists to come out in the last 100 years. Or, as I like to call it, “the new 2000-year-old paint medium.” 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It was a very bumpy road for many reasons. I thought getting ancient archaeological samples of Roman paintings for chemical analysis would be very complicated, but actually, it was easy. Once I contacted the museums and explained my project, they became interested and provided the samples. 

The complicated part was that nobody had done this kind of analysis before, so the chemists I was working with had to figure out how to conduct them, a process that took years. Additionally, I never had the money to fund this project, so I had to collaborate with chemists willing to work for free and with the time to spare. Furthermore, the major museum specialists in Greek and Roman painting, having established that Roman and Greek paintings were not done with encaustic because nobody had been able to paint with beeswax during 500 years of research, would constantly boycott and impede my research. They refused to allow my research to be published. 

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Pedro Cuni is a visual artist, painter, muralist, and expert at paint media technology, color theory, and pigments. Cuni has exhibited his art internationally at places such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Spain. Not only an expert in the landscape of painting, Cuni is known for his work with ancient painting materials, having done chemical research at Cooper Union on Ancient Greek and Roman paintings. He currently collaborates with the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, researching ancient Egyptian painting techniques. Cuni is the founder and director of the paint company Encaustic Cuni, which produces paint that was once used by Greco-Roman artists two thousand years ago. Cuni is involved in running and teaching workshops in major institutions across the world, including Taiwan, China, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and the US. 

What makes you happy?
Traveling, seeing the world, and sharing with other cultures it is so enriching. 

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cunip.myportfolio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/encaustic_cuni
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pedro.cuni
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkC24yJX07pPqp_yJoSu6ow