PRESS RELEASE

Estamos en el siglo veintiuno. No hay tiempo para gestionar las emociones.

With this title, taken from the book compiling his first comic-strip project, the artist Pato Conde presents an exhibition offering an overview of his most recent work. Drawing is the main discipline through which he takes us into a world of critical thinking and humour, helping us discover something about who we are.

The exhibition features 365 drawings, alluding to the practice of creating every day and to the continuous development of ideas through which we reflect on ourselves as human beings.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of rooms, and from the moment we enter, we encounter a deliberately chaotic arrangement of the works. There are not only drawings, but also photographs documenting creative processes, sketches, and notes of ideas from notebooks. Above all, there is an abundance of stylistic chaos characteristic of the artist’s early years of creation.

The exhibition looks back over almost twenty years of creative work, focusing particularly on five works that marked a turning point in each of the artist’s different stages. The first is an A4-sized drawing, considered his first attempt at creating a comic strip, referring to the world of skateboarding, a major influence during the early years of his practice.

Next, visitors enter a room painted black and kept in darkness, with individual spotlights illuminating the works. This space represents the visual universe of the artist’s second period. Historias del espacio exterior is a project combining comic strips, comics, sculpture and performance, using characters in outer space to reflect on the everyday life of human beings.

The centrepiece of this room is a poster featuring drawings in isometric perspective, which became the seed of the project. A small section of photographs documents the project’s public actions and interventions.

In the following space, visitors encounter a three-metre-high sculpture: a character from the Historias del espacio exterior project, with a distinctly pop aesthetic, sculpted in plaster and finished in fibreglass. The piece belongs to one of the project’s public installations and acts as the central axis of the exhibition, around which the viewer moves towards the artist’s most contemporary work, including his latest drawings and publications.

The largest room is filled with cuttings from newspapers and magazines that published the most critical and reflective period of the artist’s drawings. Jot Down, Diario de Mallorca, El País and, above all, Mongolia magazine accompanied more than ten years of the artist’s publications.

At the end of the exhibition, a white room presents the 99 drawings entitled Road to New Yorker. This collection of comic strips traces the journey of an obsession: being published by one of the most prestigious media outlets in the tradition of graphic humour. Here, visitors will find the first comic strip published by the American magazine—a turning point in the artist’s career, demonstrating a clear technical and stylistic evolution.

To conclude the exhibition, and with the intention of satirising the traditional museum shop, the artist has prepared a very special exit. A kind of gift shop made entirely of cardboard, filled with souvenirs, posters and books drawn directly onto the walls. All of this is accompanied by a small final surprise: a catalogue designed as a photocopied fanzine, which the artist offers as a gift to every visitor.

This is a highly contemporary exhibition in which the artist’s thousands of followers across different platforms will undoubtedly recognise themselves and enjoy revisiting the feelings these images evoked when they first encountered them. At the same time, it offers an ideal opportunity for those unfamiliar with his work to enter the artist’s universe for the first time.

The exhibition will remain open throughout November, December and January. It will also feature two public activities inviting visitors to explore different creative processes and approaches to generating ideas alongside the artist.

The first activity is aimed at people interested in exploring the world of comics and visual storytelling. Over the course of one hour, participants will take part in scriptwriting and drawing exercises to create a story told in three panels, returning to the classic newspaper comic-strip format.

The second activity will be a discussion between the artist, two of his editors, and three artists with whom he shares publishing platforms. They will discuss creative processes, techniques, current developments and the future of comics. It will be a special opportunity for anyone interested in exploring the world of graphic humour in much greater depth.