Trash

When I was a little boy, I found some adult comics and hide them under my bed so that my mother wouldn't find them. These publications, although maybe I discovered them a bit too early, were also a peephole that let you spy on the adult world, as well as a refuge when you could keep, or hide, your most precious belongings.

Now that I'm an adult, I feel comfortable being the kind of art that you would hide from your parents, your significant other, your kids, or any other unwelcome pair of eyes. I want to be the underground of your room.

"Trash" is one of the labels that has constantly been used to describe my work (sometimes in a disparaging tone). But because it's a term that doesn't bother me. I decided to use this critique, be it positive or negative, as the book title.

This book is a natural continuation of my first book, "Revolutionary Road", both thematically and aesthetically. The thing is, I've never felt comfortable wearing the label they've tried to put on me. The "social commentary artist" one. That makes up part of my work, yes, but it's not limitation or a constraint that I can't get out of because it's what people expect me to do.

Some of my drawings directly criticize something very concrete, but they're not the work that I feel most proud of. What I like to do, when I can manage it, is to send a message that can be interpreted in different ways depending on who sees it. And most of the time I'm not trying so much to critique, but rather to reflect the thing I see in society.

I don't know if we're moving backwards in terms of rights and liberties in today's democracies, or if it's just a feeling resulting from the massive amount of information that's available to us, but I believe that even though there are more mades to express yourself. I don't know when it was they managed to make us believe that censuring someone's work or opinion is a right. And it seems like a contradiction to me that the same people intent on imposing increasingly more zealous ultra-political correctness on culture, art, and comedy (all in the supposed name of a more integrated society) are the same people that are moving towards political parties and governments that are ultra-conservative or outright neo-fascist.

I don't think it's the same people in every case, but it does seems to me that, as a society, we sweep the dirt under the rug, just like we do in cartoons, so theta we don't have to see what we find offensive or disturbing. In the end, it's the same hypocrisy that's always been around the only thing that changes is what we consider to be dirt, what it is we try to sweep under the rug. We still don't understand that, many times, dirt is in how we look at the things we see.