The Cultural Centre La Nau of the University of Valencia hosts from 26 September to 12 January the exhibition ‘OPS / El Roto / Rábago. Un viaje de mil demonios (y un par de ángeles)’ [OPS / El Roto / Rábago. A trip of one thousand demonds (and a couple of angels)]. This ois, in words of the curator, the screenwriter Felipe Hernández, “the widest retrospective made up to now about then figure of ‘El Roto’ and all its linked identities, OPS and Andrés Rábago.
An extensive exhibition that Andres Rábago deserves because "for decades he is the most important satirical cartoonist of this country and he has achieved more accurately reflect what is happening".
Besides the countless collaborations of Andres Rábago in the most important publications of Spanish political analysis, comic and satirical, we have to add ninety exhibitions –the latest this year in New York and Chicago, and the various awards won in his career, which the National Illustration Award (2012) highlights among others.
The exhibition is organized and produced by the University of Valencia (Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture, Equality and Communication, Martinez Guerricabeitia Patronage of the General Foundation of the University of Valencia), City Council of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and the Centre d'Art Tecla Sala and features collaboration of VLC / CAMPUS, Santander Bank, through its Santander Universities Global Division-, Heineken, City Council of Valencia, Valencian Library and the Royal Academy of Arts of San Fernando.
The three largest halls of the historic building of the University of Valencia, General Studies Hall, the Acadèmia Hall and the Martinez Guerricabeitia Hall gather this major exhibition that provides an insight into the entire history of Rábago marked by a heteronyms (OPS, El Roto ), which allowed us to travel to the depth of the monsters of the human condition, through drawings in which satire and cruelty are always placed at the service of the public and social.
General Studies Hall meets the drawings of the first part of his career, when Andres Rábago signed as OPS and began with his illustrations to make more space in publications critical of the dictatorship. According to Hernández, "review OPS includes reviewing the deepest and less superficial face of what dictatorship was and the sum of repression that each of us accumulated.
The largest hall, the Acadèmia gathers images of 'El Roto', one of the Spanish most involved companies in rebuilding community cohesion. Here are, in obedience to the mandate of what the author has set to play "a public service", the the most social, popular, political, quotidian drawings, and also, according to the curator of the exhibition, all of them work as an “heteronym which is the farthest facet of Rábago real’s character.
"Finally, the Guerricabeitia Martinez Hall presents the paintings of Andres Rábago the most unknown part of his career and the most metaphysical. Hernández concludes:" Rábago’s painting opens the door to consideration of whether the visual arts over seven centuries have not been giving up the transcendental ".
Andres Rábago (Madrid, 1947)
Self-taught. Collaborating as OPS or El Roto in journals of political analysis (Triunfo Cuadernos Para el Diálogo, Ajoblanco, Cambio 16, Tiempo), comic (Tótem, Madriz) and satirical (Hermano Lobo, El Jueves) and newspapers (Diario 16, El Independiente, El Periódico de Catalunya and, for years, El País). Author of more than twenty books (most recently, 'Viñetas para una crisis’. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2011 [Col. Reservoir Books]). Illustrator of several books, mainly from his friend Manuel Vicent. Sets for Luis Matilla texts and Dithyrambos group. Co-author of the short animated film ‘La Edad del Silencio’ by Gabriel Blanco, in 1978, awarded at the International Film Festival of San Sebastian. He has made about ninety solo exhibitions, both of his drawings and their paintings (who signs as Rábago), the latest, this year in New York and Chicago. He has been honored with awards Francisco Cerecedo Journalism Award (1993), Premio al Pensamiento de Cambio 16 (1995), Premio al Mérito Urbanístico del Club de Debates Urbanos (1997), International Humor Award Gat Perich (1997), Julian Besteiro of Arts and Letters Award (2005), FAD Medal (2006), Human Rights Association Award (2011) and National Illustration Award (2012).
From OPS to Rabago through 'El Roto', in La Nau
In the mid-sixties of last century, when more mass reaffirmed as synonymous with individual, although obviously without the current intensity, Andres Rábago undertook a personal journey away from the futility of his time, to stop being a man Without Qualities. He used, in the first instance, a pseudonym, OPS, which began to make more space in publications critical of a dictatorship that, as such, was no friend of free thought. He served as under pseudonym, not hiding, to face an insight into his unconscious by a form of self-analysis with which it was difficult to identify, given that dirt that is going to evolve in each vignette was the same as sensitivity dulled us all. Monsters that OPS discovered when I looked inside were the same that had enslaved our reason to it again too lazy to take a new time that we thought that would come later or earlier.
From time to time, however, the social question and the political question made an appearance in those satirical and cruel cartoons, aware that its creator community ties had suffered a serious break during the long dictatorship. Without any kind of shock, at the beginning of the next decade, the seventies, it was revealing a heteronym: El Roto. A heteronym, yes, because his personality was clearly differentiated from the author, who rightly installed his creature in the area of civil awareness, understanding from the outset that his aim was to make a public service and social status of individual break-mass to boot your spectator position a divisive and numbing reality.
OPS and El Roto arrived to walk part of the way together (no drawings, for example, 1976, signed by the two). However, while the first, clean and excrescences, wandered for drawing and painting also followed by more aesthetic areas bordering visual poetry, the second would be consolidated, until today, as one of the most involved Spanish firms in rebuilding community cohesion and claim the concept of person, cornered by the concept of individual modernity brought forth and established.
OPS, however, would be silencing as a draftsman until the arrival of the new century, and he displayed in the last moments of intensity and unparalleled graphical excellence while OPS painter began a drift from the eighties, to what could be considered as linguists name a Ortónimo: Andres Rábago the architect of one's own work, whose voice is the most similar to the deepest interests of its creator, who shares name and last name, a Bernardo Soares bit like Fernando Pessoa.
The territory of the painter Rábago certainly deployed in a higher realm of consciousness, a realm that could qualify as metaphysical, in which 'what is said' can not be easily transmitted because it is more spiritual matters earthly and in him, in the manner of pre-Renaissance artists, yet free of excessive ego footprint, modest acts as a travel guide through the path that constitute their works, by a cosmos that there is no mapping that the doer is defining himself as a greater awareness of the infinite mysteries of true and unknown reality.
Last update: 26 de september de 2013 13:27.
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