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

City police in Barcelona force the artist Albert Tarragó to draw portraits like "the others"

Police forbid him display "funny" drawings at his workplace by threatening to withdraw his portraitist license.

Albert wonders why, if there is such a problem, the City Council has not allowed him change its specialty to cartoonist the last two times he has renewed his annual permit.

    The small group of cartoonists who have been denouncing him the last five years gets consolidate its monopoly upon Cheap and funny drawings, even when a majority of the group of artists has been asking repeatedly the Council that don't differ specialties such as portrait and caricature .

    City Hall's argument has always been than "do not change anything because soon they're going to reform everything"

MALAYSIA, The pure portrait's refuge

New chapter of Albert Tarragó's Graphic work catalog

A six months technical evolution in a nation of beautiful cities overflowing with history and people with a captivating hospitality.A period during which the taste and sensitivity of Malaysian publics molded new concepts of portrait and caricature, with fully expectation and respect for creative freedom, without the existing bureaucratic restrictions from "La Rambla" of Barcelona.LINK TO THE NEW CHAPTER OF CATALOG

Malaysia, 1st chapter of the guidebook GLOBAL ART of international mobility

Tarragó Albert is the author of the first chapter of the "Guidebook of workplaces and cultural projects for artists in transit", which aims to be a collaborative handbook open to contributions from other artists and promoting entities.

The idea is to provide artist travelers, during their journey, access to places where to be able stopping to develop their creative activity and explore more deeply the local cultures.

LINK TO THE GUIDEBOOK GLOBAL ART (MALAYSIA)