Season in exile, 2014

Series: Last work done

    Portrait and caricature are essentially "pure communication". Paper and pigments are worthless without the message being transmitted through them. Thus, drawing someone is like "talk to someone" and this "someone" choose an artist or another depending on the type of message or quality which it offers him.

A portrait, according to the dictionary definition, is the representation of a person through drawing or painting. However, at Las Ramblas of Barcelona free expression still were prohibited, so that portraitist style had to fit the concept of portrait than a city police corporal could understand. So, for the fifth consecutive year, this summer I was forbidden to "talk" spontaneously with humor on my job either in order to drawing attention of people or have fun with my drawings. This coercion recent months caused me so much anxiety that I had fallen ill.

For this reason I was forced to relocate my job to a small village on the Catalan coast. There, while awaiting the arrival of the high season, I was drawing new samples in absolute freedom in the hope of recovering the fullness of my faculties.

Llegir en català

Leer en Castellano

Repression in La Rambla of Barcelona

New chapter of Albert Tarragó's Graphic work catalog:

When to copying photos is called do portraits

           Twelve years ago, when a portraitist applied for a permit to draw people in La Rambla, then the City council examined him by asking him to draw a person in front a commission of experts.

            But after eight years on the street many portraitists had grown used to copying photos instead of drawing the people. To do this, they were using as a bait astonishing photorealistic drawings made ​​with the help of a projector such that hardly they could match its effect when the client was a person sitting before them. The disappointment caused by this widespread practice had been increasing distrust among the public, thus, the difficulty to find customers had risen while prices decreased to almost those of caricatures.

            But the worst started to happen the day it was the public administration itself and local police those who started to require the portraitists to exhibit those misleading portraits copied from photos as a sample for the public. Paradoxically, insisted, it was the only technique for which they had been autorized.

LINK TO THE NEW CHAPTER OF CATALOG