Antonio Pichillá is an artist of the Tz'utujil contemporary. His work deconstructs the imposed historical idea of how the "Indian" should exist. Colorful (exotic) landscapes and textiles. Tz'utujil women with baskets, xecas and vegetables painted in places far away... Tz'utujil men traveling in small boats in the middle of blue landscapes and lots of fish hanging in their hands.

To understand Pichillá's work is to understand that indigenous people are an antithesis of the "Indian" that created the vision of the architects of the state/nation. For the Tz'utujiles have moved and move in their own epistemologies, integrating and discarding ideas, trades and contradictions in their contemporary daily lives.

Pichillá reminds us in his forms, non-forms and strokes, infinite possibilities of creation, recreation of fabrics, colors, materials, symbols and senses of being and remaining Tz'utujil from the past and in the present.

His creations present themselves as a reaction to this "according to the rules of civility" that need to name, theorize and give aesthetic and economic value to "something of someone"... Something of a someone that does not resemble the indito of the Guatemala imagined since colonial times, reformulated by the Criollos and promoted for tourism in our days. If it is not shown as an element of the heterogeneous Tz'utujil of contemporary everyday life, which escapes from what is expected by the fictions of the exotic academic and tourist otherness, of the good evangelical and Catholic Christian, even of the Mayanist autoexoticization. A Saq B'eey or path illuminated by our memory of the history that builds us and accompanies us, to continue being and doing as Tz'utujil, K'iché, Mam, Ixil in a world of infinite colors and knowledge on the verge of ecological collapse.

 — María Jacinta Xón Riquiac