THE ONE AND ONLY CONVERSATION OR SIMULATED DIALOGUE WITH RIGOBERTO CASOLA

 

We almost had a previous encounter, prior to this article. You were to be discussing your work. I would be paying attention to all the information that could be useful to decipher the codes of the scrambled universe that your creations reveal. I wanted to know about your artistic motivation, if your motivation came from the need to exteriorize any cystic lack of modesty in the deep recesses of your mind, or if it was about reproaching us our human immodesty. I wanted to discover if the morbidity in your representations was a privative subject of your personal world or an echo of a common world that works, many times, under the sexual logics that you represent. I was hoping that you would talk to me, frenetically. I visualized myself dumbstruck before your performative speech, desiring to assume the role of an art psychoanalyst in order to understand the reasons behind the depths of your production.

 

I was holding my questions for that conversation, but you never showed up. Why does Rigo appear in the stories of your comic books? Did this presence mean you surmounted your traumas, of the irrationalized issues, of what your mind relegated to a corner so far away, to the ones that were probably inaccessible, had there not been that representation? Why didn’t you treat the subject of obscene act in the manner of Robert Crumb (1) with Zap Comix (2)? Did any mooring rope exist as a motive of your containment in your representation? Any symbolic intimidation because of the presence of voyeurs, of importunate entities that, as I noticed, frequently interrupt the sexual fantasies and romantic moments in your stories? I wanted you to talk about your longing for a “happy ending,” the one that you wrote down in your notebook as an important requirement to forge a tale. I never had the certainty of whether you were able to superimpose it to the political, social and religious contingencies that confronted your characters in those stories.

 

Countless times I pored over your images. I knew that the audacity of your graphic license nourishes your work in a very special way. That by the way in which that you order and disorder the story, you delimit or confuse your vignettes, you debate yourself among the demonstration of an esthetic submission, and the need to free the complex and disorganized nature from spaces that you evoke. I recognized the dystopia of some of those spaces. The shaky morality pointed out by your satirical tone. The tragicomedy of a suspended world in the “hyper-modernity of the excesses,” and that with more certainty you are able to condense in your collages. While I was looking through the details of those collages, I confess that I felt the same hot flush that I felt when I listened to the never-ending list of “more,” describing the excess of our visual culture, in the TV series trailer for “Black Mirror” (3). That tremendous list connected me with the accumulation of cars, political fetishes, sexual icons, clippings of publicity, news from the space race and others similar amounts of the limitless consumption of our “mad” humanity, put together in your visual assemblages.

 

I ask myself where your personality is best illuminated, if in those singular scenes where there’s still some hint of eloquence, under the laws of a verifiable world, or in the rarefied representations that derive from your notebook. These creatures —amorphous, monstrous, psychotic, of myriad appearances— drawn in front of or behind unintelligible phrases where you sketch the stories to be told, no longer inhabit the world that I know. You could have told me, perhaps, that they hail from another world, imaginarily visited in any of your interstellar missions.

 

Anyway, I am led away by that torrent of histrionic imagery. I will continue to experience your fantasy-filled world with the same certainties that the real world provided me with. Probably this will be the one and only clue I’ll get to discover some of the secrets behind your creation. I hope you don’t see me as a voyeur, like some busybody wanting to snoop around in your issues. I hope you don’t see me as one of those modern surveillance devices that are used to examine even the insides of a person's corporal cavities. You must know that this is not my intention. And if you could think so, I hope you absolve me, knowing that your imagery works as compensation for the tedium of my own images and contested objectivity.

 

Yenisel Osuna Morales, curator and art historian.

 

1. A North American comic strip artist and illustrator. One of the founding fathers of the underground comic book. According to many specialists he is probably the most important member of this movement.

2. One of Robert Crumb's more controversial publications. Its transgressive content is related to youth counterculture. The publication was object of numerous reports for obscene acts, especially because of its issue No. 4.

3. Anthological British series made by Netflix and created by Charlie Brooker in 2011. It shows the darkest and most controversial side of technology and how it destabilizes our lives.