Carlos Nine Interview Translation

From: Hommage A L'arrière-cour

Translated to English:

INTERVIEW WITH CARLOS NINE

I am going to ask you a rhetorical question, but... do you remember your first feelings after noticing you had an aptitude for drawing?

That is impossible to remember, but I think it began to make sense to me when I joined the first social fabric, which is public school. I associate it with blackboards, playgrounds, the flag, national holidays, and the smell of chalk. For me, school was unforgettable; it is thanks to it that I became an illustrator. I realized that this skill gave me a power. Obviously, when it came to choosing the flag-bearer, they always favored the student with the best average in mathematics, but when it was time to insert the traditional images of national independence into the calendar, just like in the caves of Altamira, they had to call upon the sorcerer capable of invoking shapes and making them appear—meaning me. To top it off, an exciting side effect was added, undoubtedly linked to my budding libido. Thanks to my mastery of colored chalks, the teachers would kiss me and hold me against their chests, which was no small thing. As for the king of mathematics, he merely got written congratulations in his notebook, the poor guy.

What was your family like?

It was an immigrant family. My four grandparents were European: two were Italian and two were Spanish.

Was your father Argentine?

No, Dad and his siblings were born in Galicia. Actually, my Galician grandfather arrived all alone, having abandoned his wife and children. So my grandmother, tired of waiting for him in vain, sold everything, took her children, and embarked for Buenos Aires in search of her deserting husband. They grew up as good people—poor and hardworking, toughened but sensitive.

Your name doesn't sound Galician...

Yes, it likely has another origin.

And the other side of your family, your mother's side?

Italian immigrants as well. They came from the Le Marche region, which at one time was part of the Papal States, lands belonging to the Roman papacy. My maternal surname is precisely Del Papa. The name Le Marche means that the Vatican's territory stopped there, right up to that mark.

I hope you are not trying to impress us...

No, not at all, that was exactly how it was. They had a hard and awful life, worthy of a De Amicis short story. Many immigrants from the Le Marche region arrived at that time in Haedo, a town in the suburbs of Buenos Aires which, more than a town, was a major railway hub where I was eventually born. Entire villages would immigrate together to another place in America in order to maintain common businesses, remain neighbors, and not pine too much for the land they left behind. In the midst of this social shipwreck—the waves of millions of immigrating people—elements nonetheless emerged that forged the uniqueness of this country. After a few years, once settled, everything started to fall into place in a certain way, and what is interesting is that the immigrants didn't try to maintain an ethnic order; they mixed with each other! Of course, assuming one could choose as they pleased... My father, the Galician, married a girl from Le Marche.

Did people from your family return to their home villages?

No, never. I am the only one who went (returned?) to both places. I had to go. In Dad's village, which is called Seixomil, in the Ourense region, there are only about thirty inhabitants left. The Italians' village, Petriolo, is situated on top of a hill with a castle, olive trees, and two thousand inhabitants.

What did your father do?

My father owned a shoe store, but by calling, he loved music; he was a violinist, a tango violinist. I navigated alternately between two quite magical environments where my father circulated, two places equally fascinating but for different reasons. One was his shoe store, and the other was the stages of the clubs where he played with his orchestra.

What were these places like?

For me, that shoe store was like going to a show, given the theatrical relationships my father established with his customers, always varying in style and nature depending on the person he was dealing with. The man was a born actor. In reality, many people went to his shop to engage in crazy debates rather than to buy shoes, which explained our relative poverty. Dad tried to compensate for this through his true calling: music. Every Saturday, he would take his instrument and join his orchestra mates to liven up the dances, which were so numerous back then in the Buenos Aires suburbs. I always tried to follow him, using the pretext of carrying his violin. I didn't want to miss the marvel of couples dancing to a live orchestra, dragging their feet across the tiled floor, beneath the moon, the stars, and the swaying of colored lanterns in summer. Stationed near the pianist on the wooden stage, I watched all this beauty. What joy!

And what about your budding calling for drawing?

As I told you, my taste for drawing was confined to the boundaries of the school; it was like a childhood stunt, until the day my father made the decision to remove the shoes from his store window and display my little drawings in their place, for the neighborhood folks to see. That Saturday morning, walking past by chance, I couldn't believe my eyes. Two or three old ladies standing on the sidewalk were sizing up my "artwork." I blushed and kept walking, but I was no longer the same. I had a calling. Hence the importance of a pat on the back at the right moment.

Did your status within the family change from that moment on?

Yes, in a sense, that's what happened. There was always someone asking me to draw something for them and showing off to relatives or strangers this skill they believed I had. Word had spread that I was a genius at these things. On one hand, I felt important, in demand, but at the same time, I started to see myself as a sort of clown, like a trained dog doing tricks, you know? It wasn't a nice feeling, or at least it was contradictory. I spent my life doing "demonstrations." For example, I would do little drawings for my cousin, but all the while, I was thinking that I would have rather just played with her... I confusingly experienced the first tugs-of-war of life...

Thinking about what you were telling me earlier about the shoe store, I'm starting to think that certain elements were linked to a theatrical delight or, if you prefer, a system of little attractions, family exercises, something along those lines...

Yes, it's true... Perhaps it was the influence of the sainete. That genre was very popular at the time.

What was the sainete?

A short little play, a comedy of manners that reflected in a tragicomic style the struggles of immigrants, their overcrowding in tenement houses (old mansions that had once belonged to wealthy families). People from all over the world were crammed in there; you could hear every language spoken, with a predominance of the largest migratory flow: Italian. The sainete had emerged to represent an urban phenomenon. But there were also plays inspired by gaucho culture (pampa herdsmen, T.N.) that were performed in circuses and village squares—rural theater. Juan Moreira and Santos Vega were works presented in circuses before an audience comprised of workers from the lowest classes, mostly European immigrants who came in droves to listen to these stories of outcasts and rebellious, outlaw gauchos.

These works ultimately played a role that went beyond simple entertainment. Little by little, they established a new popular mythology among people disillusioned with their home countries and ready to listen. They provided them with new bearings, a sense of belonging which, though fragile, established a common code. It is hardly surprising, then, to notice the current of sympathy that formed between these stories of gauchos pursued by the law and the millions of people hunted in Europe by war and poverty. These stories later transitioned to the radio where everyone could listen to them, which I also experienced toward the end of their run. Our culture was highly theatrical.

They were cultural instruments that created social bonds...

Yes, and the exact same thing happened with tango, another invention of the port that welcomed immigration. I was recently telling someone that tango was the little fire lit by immigrants, by orphans, to warm their hands after the shipwreck.

It's your music, isn't it?

Yes, it is the music from here. I am talking about music and not just songs; I mean that when a people lacks music, they might settle for songs, but it is not the same thing. Personally, tango has served me and still serves me, including as a way to illuminate a controversial suburb of art history. To look no further, I was able to grasp the fundamental idea of Cubism by closely listening to and feeling the tango titled Arrabal, by José Pascual—obviously in the version by Osvaldo Pugliese, an absolute gem. In reality, almost everything old Pugliese's orchestra plays consists of dismantling a theme to reassemble it again from several different angles. Exactly as Cézanne did with perspective. That orchestra was pure image. Tango is basically classical music composed by bums. Like me, I'm a bum, while also being an academic. As a girl once wrote in the guestbook of an exhibition dedicated to me at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires: "You draw in lunfardo (Buenos Aires slang, T.N.)." I never found out who she was, but she illuminated my entire struggle in four words.

Have you produced works specifically related to tango?

As I was telling you, tango is also a visual genre, and I am not alluding to the dance. I am talking about the incredible amount of sheet music with illustrated covers that were printed by the thousands. My father had a large number of them to study; it was a treat to look at them, just seeing them made you want to draw. In fact, Eduardo Arolas, one of the most eminent composers of the early century and a bandoneon pioneer, was also an illustrator, and of the highest caliber. He died in Paris at the age of thirty-two. I have a lot of illustrated tangos. If we carefully examine the mechanism of a tango with its lyrics, we see that it's a miniature opera of barely three minutes, a musical script. This generates a lot of images, believe me. I have just finished an unusual project related to this theme. It's for a new subway line in Buenos Aires, Line H, a thematic line where each station is dedicated to one of the main protagonists of this musical genre. There are about ten murals in each; I got the Osvaldo Fresedo station, who was a very posh orchestra conductor, a true dandy.

Naturally, those evenings when you followed your father's orchestra must have influenced your state of mind...

Yes, inevitably. The visual element was very important—the two planes on which this artistic and social phenomenon of the tango dance with an orchestra unfolded: the stage where the musicians played, elevated above the dance floor, and the couples below, embraced, absorbed, out of this world. I decoded what I could given my age, but the impact must have been very powerful because I never forgot it. No need to tell you what it was like during carnival time, when a guy dressed as a musketeer danced with a blonde dressed (or undressed) as a Hawaiian. Returning home, I was like a madman, trying to draw what I had seen. I still had the faces, the expressions, the details, the colors, the hairstyles, and the smells in my head. As well as the sensations—the most undefinable and difficult to describe thing. To understand the extent to which all this marked my perceptual system, just look at the anachronistic fashion of my female characters, as many people have noticed. Those double-breasted suits with shoulder pads were dynamite. Just look at the black cops of the era and their wives—one hell of some broads, right? The same thing happened with the innocent young girl from the neighborhood: come nightfall, she would dress to the nines and show up at the dance transformed into a volcano. She seemed to say: "I'm here, buddy, available and hungry." I believe that if I have anything resembling a style, I owe it to this culture that I lived and integrated forever. It's crazy, this business of roots, isn't it?

Yes, it marks you forever...

Yes. Although, thinking about it today, I must say that not everyone reacted the same way to the phenomenon I just described to you. To me, it made my head explode with pleasure. I remember a short story by Julio Cortázar, The Gates of Heaven, inspired exactly by this theme. Beyond his beautiful writing, you can observe the disgust, the nausea that the spectacle and our people provoked in him. It's truly curious. The South African mentality of this guy so celebrated by progressives is truly astonishing.

Yet, all of Cortázar's work is written in "Argentine"...

Yes, but with a French sauce. Frightened by his surroundings, he fled and, once settled in Paris, he started to dig into this feeling of nostalgia. Then, after a few experiments, he finally decided to build this puppet of the "cultural exile who writes in Argentine," a combination that inspires a lot of sympathy, something akin to I love you but I flee from you. Very often he clarified that he was not a political exile, that his country simply "bored him," "horrified him." After a long period of time, he began to understand something about Latin America, "thanks to Cuba," according to him. Can you imagine? More superficial and idiotic than that is impossible. There are many of that species.

A bit like the Borges case...

I think they had a lot in common. To paraphrase Gaudí speaking of Picasso, one could imagine a comment from Borges about Cortázar: "Cortázar is a leftist; neither am I." They were both the puppet-projects of a domineering mother who pushed her offspring to embrace a literary career. Old iron-fisted hags, advising their sons, with dead or absent husbands. Two guys frightened and disconcerted by the country they were dealt, although Borges stayed and still sought a sentimental bond through exotic fables involving duels and knife-fighters, while the other fantasized about "the little bull from Mataderos" without leaving the banks of the Seine... What strange birds, those two!

I would now like to leave literary questions aside to return to the theme of the women who impressed you so much at your childhood dances. I would dare to point out to you that the overwhelming majority of the drawings in this book are dedicated to women, to the female body, over and over, over and over again... Aren't you going a bit too far, old man? You seem a little obsessed with it. I ask you this with all due respect.

No, no, that doesn't offend me, you're right; don't be embarrassed, I put myself in your shoes. The female body has an irresistible power of fascination over my mind. I am talking about any woman—young, old, child, it doesn't matter. I could tell you that it is simply the morphological aspect that interests me, but that wouldn't be honest. It's perhaps because we all come from a woman's body, I don't know, something along those lines. Remember that in the history of art, the main icons almost always represent a woman or a female body. What you're saying is true; most of these drawings use the female body as a pretext. There is a series where I imagined the loneliness of a housewife once her partner has left and she remains alone, feeling hot, bored, locked in that daily and predestined space that is the kitchen. Other drawings take as a pretext the mishaps of cooking an octopus—it's completely crazy—and even the strange bonds that could form between a lonely lady and this deft octopod who doesn't have much left to lose, given his situation. A lovely story with an uncertain ending, isn't it? I don't know, when I arrive in these suburbs of reason, I get lost in the alleyways of my own ramblings...

That's disgusting, it makes me want to vomit, I assume you're being ironic. Speaking of irony, there are also sketches of fake advertisements. Do you also use advertising as a pretext for drawing?

Yes, there are sketches about fake advertisements, about consumption, useless products, like almost everything we buy. The idea came to me while strolling along the Seine, as I rummaged through a collection of old advertising "commercials" from the 20s and 30s sold by the booksellers along the quays. They are reproductions on metal. There are also lithographic posters in the Toulouse-Lautrec style; it's a particular aesthetic that attracts me, it is stimulating and can lead to anything. I would love to promote the sale of products that are completely useless. So that people scramble for them and fall into depression, or are on the verge of suicide when they can't get a hold of them. Nice "performance," no?

Are you interested in pedagogy? Do you like teaching what you know?

I love it. Whenever I can, usually as a complement to an exhibition, I lead a small workshop. And it's less about what I can "teach" that interests me, than coming into contact with people who are looking for their path, people who have generally made remarkable discoveries, so that I learn too. The younger they are, the better, and if their brains haven't yet been stuffed with planetary dictates like those damned manga, for example, it's even better. But those who escape these cultural ambushes are so rare.

What experiences have you had in this field?

Quite a few, I must say. I have done many presentations, usually called lectures, small seminars not exceeding four days, both in our country and abroad. I remember a fairly recent experience in La Paz, Bolivia, with enthusiastic and creative young people, as this demographic that possesses a true culture generally is. Then there was the experience I had in Poitiers and Angoulême, where the two Schools of the Image in France are located—true laboratories of the graphic image. They have an excellent teaching program. The last time I had the opportunity to engage in this kind of activity, in the company of unforgettable people, was in Bariloche, that beautiful city in Argentine Patagonia, by a lake. Fortunately, I have now been able to set up workshops capable of developing pedagogical work in an appropriate setting. We'll see how it works out in the long run.

I would now like to ask you an awkward question: what relationship do you maintain with the antinomic pairing of figuration vs. abstraction?

I believe the conflict you mention never existed. Everything we call "art" in the realm of the image is an abstraction, and it is so by its very physical nature; it is an inevitability. We don't make noses. The draftsman merely evokes the concept of a "nose" by means of lines or brushstrokes; he deploys it in a two-dimensional space (height by width), which is that of the paper or canvas. A real three-dimensional shape is therefore evoked, symbolized, and "flattened" onto a two-dimensional shape. It's an abstract artifice that, in the hands of good craftsmen, can transmit sentimental messages wielding a powerful power of suggestion over the masses, but it is an abstract representation. One only has to recall the solid union that has always existed between artists and the Church in the pursuit of evangelization. People ended up convincing themselves that under the vaults there were flying angels because, even if it wasn't true, it was plausible and it helped us familiarize ourselves with the choreography of a new spirituality. These techniques made the most unusual episodes of the original Catholic fable digestible. Paolo Uccello, obsessed with a credible version of perspective, striving to perfect these representations, was not only pursuing formal research but a strategic, ideological need. With the emergence of individualism, the entire system of specialists in representations of reality crumbles, the myth of perspective collapses, the game is from then on liberated, but abstract it has always been. Abstraction precedes the word that designates it. That reminds me of a phrase by the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt: "Reality is a hypothesis of the imagination."

Yes, but what do you say then about the three-dimensional representations that sculpture provides us?

Well, even if one adds an extra dimension, it's the same thing. The pursuit of the exteriority of things is an old obsession of this demiurge we call "artist." The polychrome woods of Southern Spain are in this sense a great example of the search for this effect. It should also be noted in them a very marked link with theatrical language... In reality, if we look at art books with a different eye, one realizes that many famous sculptural groups can be considered theatrical representations.

At one point in this book, we can see bas-reliefs that you have made and which support this idea. Are they simple stylistic exercises, virtuosic exhibitionism, or are they part of a project?

No, no, it is not exhibitionism that drives me to work—quite the contrary, I work for myself. These experiences of sculpted, then painted, and finally photographed bas-reliefs accumulated out of an expressive need, that's all; to tell the truth, I didn't know what I would do with them. Many of them were born from sketches that can be seen here and which find their culmination in the reliefs. Relief is interesting; it is a form that strives to detach itself from the plane without ever managing to free itself from it completely, isn't it?

I don't know; I just ask the questions.

It's just a figure of speech, you idiot.

Right, I repeat my question: will these bas-reliefs fulfill any function?

Probably. The images suggested texts to me, and the whole thing was progressively published in an Argentine cultural magazine entitled La Mujer de mi Vida (The Woman of My Life, T.N.). With French friends, we plan to use all this material to publish a book one of these days that would gather the whole series, which would give it stylistic coherence.

I have another antinomic pairing to throw in your face like a hot towel, to see how you handle it. Gallery art or graphic art?

It's not possible! This idiocy again?

I will clarify my question. You express yourself through illustration, painting, sculpture, animation, photography and what have you; in short, a bunch of disciplines. But which of them all is closest to your heart?

All of them—and I notice you forgot comic strips—respond to my immediate aesthetic and expressive interests. I make no distinction between these various modes of expression, and I try in my own way to recapture a bit of the Renaissance spirit, as the Bauhaus also attempted in recent times. Traversing the paths that connect all these arts to one another with as few prejudices as possible, that is the core issue. And doing it for real, not just proclaiming it.

In visual representation, the problem to be solved always remains the same: what do we do with space and image. That is why I am very excited today by the possibilities opened up by the comic strip, which brings together several practices dear to me such as drawing, architecture, poetry, the short story, opera, cinema, and theater.

That's quite a lot, isn't it?

No, because I work like a researcher. Having gone through the Academy of Fine Arts as a student familiarized me with these practices. I constantly and ceaselessly browse through the history of art; I take enormous delight in continuously finding connections I hadn't noticed, unusual associations between schools and trends. In fact, until now, the activity of a careful "snooper" is the one I've practiced the most—a sort of art history detective—since it was only around 1980-82 that I began to draw systematically. Before that, I had dedicated myself to working as an advertising designer to survive, as well as to politics, to activism.

Right now, I am exploring with great enthusiasm the possibilities of comics, I paint in large formats, I make mobile sculptures, but everything is a matter of cycles and, in a while, we will undoubtedly move on to something else. Until the day we disappear like a point in space. In short, I travel.

Yet, this attitude of going in and out of different means of expression does not guarantee the resolution of a problem that causes insomnia for many of those who do the same work as you. I am talking about achieving one's own style that allows differentiating the work of one author from that of another... How does one achieve this?

Uh... I have no idea. The questions you come up with! I have no explanation. Style is a hard thing to define because it undoubtedly stems from territories of the unconscious. I believe it's a constituent element of personality, like handwriting, right? It must be unconscious; seen from the outside, they tell you that you have a style, but I don't notice anything because it is my natural way of doing things—it's not forced, it's not artificial. If I distort objects or draw them in a specific way, it's because that is how I see them; there isn't an intentional stylistic search by decree of the will. Of course, if I took refuge behind a planetary trend, a "school", I would evade the problem...

What do you mean? I seem to perceive a venomous intention behind your sentence...

It's very clear. So far, I have spoken of this activity as a path of introspection, of a search for sincere expression, of putting my inner self into images, of "objectifying the subject," as philosophers would say. Without pushing the speculation any further. Nevertheless, if this search had a commercial repercussion, so much the better, but if that were not the case, patience, because it's each person's personality that is at stake, right? On the other hand, if we seek to take refuge behind the "ligne claire" [clear line] (it's just an example), the only problem that arises is that of translation. The translation of a formal spectrum into a geometric dogma.

After a little training, we would have another perfect Belgian boy, even if he was born in Manchuria. Because this neurotic exaltation of serenity and harmony called "ligne claire" is a funny Belgian invention. I give this example as I could give others; the impostures are innumerable. I remember that in the 80s, there were so many Gigers that it was a nightmare. Or let's take the current paradigm, a certain Labanda whose style looks like a clumsy 50s drawing, an effect he achieves very well. I think these are variations of decadence; there is nothing else to say or do. It is a dilemma, of course, because you have to earn a living. You even find good artists who fall under a satellite or revival aesthetic, but well, what do you want... Drawing: profession or calling? I don't know, it depends on each person. The resonance is close, but to be and to appear are not the same thing. Do you understand the existential aspect of the question? No, I see you don't grasp it, your eyes are glazed over...

Yes, well, don't overdramatize. To get back to your work, and since you had an academic education, I assume this familiarity with the practice of drawing made it easier for you to master the craft...

Wrong again. I don't really have a natural facility for drawing. It requires a lot of work from me, in the sense that I doubt a lot, so I do a ton of pencil sketching and I run into problems by the shovel full. Thus, I must undoubtedly have a somewhat distorted perception because my drawings veer upwards and to the right.

When I turn them over (that's the acid test), I realize that everything is crooked and I have to straighten it all out because my drawing collapses, it's only fit for the trash. So I go over it again, I have to lower and fix everything, I use tracing paper a lot, among other things. I work like a beast, I multiply the sketches, I throw them away, I ball them up... I worry myself sick; I'd really love to have a natural facility.

It must not be easy to master these distortions... You're a funny guy.

Well, now, when I elongate a drawing, when I widen it or twist it, I know why, but at the beginning it was a blind gesture and it showed because it was badly done, a real disaster. Every distortion has its logic. It's not just anything. There are laws; I discovered this while doing this work, I found several fundamental laws that served me later on.

Which ones, for example?

For example, the opposition of forms. I realized that, instinctively, I balanced every form. I can make a crazy shape, which in itself means nothing, but I know how to counterbalance it with another that will act as a counterpoint. Then, into these forms, I introduce the anecdote, whether it's an ass, a head, an automobile. But I seek first of all to get the overall form. I can make any shape, provided it's interesting, provided it's a good "pattern," as the Anglo-Saxons would say. Then, I can draw a guy on horseback or a crying mother, it doesn't matter, it will be inscribed within this general, containing form. That is what dictates things. I had to learn to reflect on my natural tendencies; I had to think. That's what I was telling you earlier, art is always abstract. Maybe that is what "style" is.

What about materials? What do you work with? Do you have preferences?

With almost all materials, generally, with the exception of acrylics and oil pastels...

Oh really? I thought you used oil pastels.

No, no, what I use are chalk pastels, dry pastels like the ones Degas used, they are extraordinary. They form a pasty texture of a richness unique in its kind, very sensual.

You are also known in your country and in France for your watercolors...

Yes, I love watercolor immensely. I was thrilled by this technique after seeing a book containing reproductions of Edmond Dulac, a French artist who worked his whole life in England, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. He was very spectacular in his technique and his highly creative forms...

Speaking more specifically about drawing, since this is a book of drawings, what instruments do you usually use?

Generally, I use nib pens for inks, although you can find a bit of everything here. For pencil drawings, on the other hand, I use mechanical pencils of my own making that hold graphite leads. Most of these pencil drawings are done using these homemade, but well-crafted, utensils. There is also charcoal of all kinds, with a predominance of Wolfs...

Do you attach importance to the tools you use?

Ah yes, it's fundamental. Drawing partakes heavily in an ancestral rite; there is and will be no substitute activity, it cannot be compared with the harmless sliding of a computer mouse. Grasping a pencil is quite similar to grasping a weapon. It is a sensual art. And not only that. In the past, I worked on a table I built myself that had a hollow board.

It was a wooden frame covered on each side with a thin wooden plank, so that an air chamber formed between the two. It was like a percussion instrument. If you drummed on it with your fingers, you got an impressive sound, and when I drew a line on a sheet of paper placed on its surface, the board would return to me the deep echo of the sound produced by the line. Do you understand? I was getting the sonic dimension of the line.

Doesn't going to the extreme of making your own drawing instruments denote an excessive obsession with the material and manual aspect?

No, don't talk nonsense. Talking for so long just to arrive at that! I naturally have very high regard for manual skill, the construction of tools, or any other means of acquiring dexterity; dexterity is important in this trade. It's perhaps linked to my family background. When I was a teenager, my father had this immense calling for music that we talked about, specifically for the violin (a devilish instrument to master if ever there was one), but as a poor immigrant, he was broke, he couldn't afford to buy his own instrument, which was too expensive at the time. So he made one himself, it was his first violin. I recently realized the extent of his need when I learned that he had shaped and polished it using shards of glass.

No doubt this interest in volumes also includes architecture...

Yes, it's one and the same thing: sculpture, objects in general. My house-studio is a project I designed drawing inspiration from the other branch of my family, the Italians on my mother's side. They were railway workers. I built a sort of train station; I love that kind of architecture and I love trains.

A passion similar to the one you have for drawing instruments...

Everything is connected. I always wanted to have a workspace with certain characteristics. Railway architecture, although designed for another use, gave me this possibility. I am convinced that living in a house is not the same as inhabiting an idea. It is linked, and I hope it doesn't sound pedantic to say so, to a very personal conception of space; it's an idea and not a generic, standardized space...

How did you proceed? Practically, factually speaking, I mean...

First I made a cardboard model with all the details that an object of such small dimensions would allow me. Then we drew up very precise plans on the computer, especially regarding the ironwork which was very complex. We had to think about and calculate the possibilities of the iron. Then look for a blacksmith willing to do the job. If I couldn't find a good blacksmith, I was cooked; the key to the whole thing was the ironwork and the ad hoc craftsman. In a year and a half, it was built, despite all the problems that had to be solved as the construction progressed. At times, it looked strangely like a nightmare.

Let's move on to your books. Your first books as a complete author, meaning written and drawn by you, were curiously published in France and not in your own country. How do you explain this?

I could talk about the abyssal difference separating the two publishing industries, but that explains nothing. France has a natural disposition, not forced or decreed by law, to remain on alert, in a posture of absorption, attentive and understanding, one might say, toward everything that passes under the noses of cultural operators, publishers, critics, and other theorists, as bizarre as it may seem. No one forces them, nor are these suggestions from the Ministry of Culture; they do it naturally, it's their nature, they have a kind of periscope constantly moving in search of something interesting to incorporate. It is no coincidence that such a large number of painters, playwrights, writers, comic book authors, actors, directors, musicians, and singers have throughout history ended up going to work there (or for there, as is my case), swelling the thickness of the French cultural substrate, integrating and permissive, in marked contrast with others that are restrictive and rejecting. The secret is in the noggin (brain)? In '68, they held the first comic strip exhibition... at the Louvre! Of course, this whole movement is accompanied by a multitude of related activities, where the cherry on the cake is the Angoulême festival, the most prestigious in Europe.

Your appearance on the Argentine publishing market dates back to the year 82, with caricatures for the cover of a satirical magazine of the time. What relationship do you have with caricature, of whatever kind it may be?

None. My adventure as a caricaturist lasted exactly as long as I was commissioned to do the covers for that publication, which was about eight years. I never did caricatures again. It was a completely improvised job, dictated by the need to do something that would bring me a little money and that was connected to what interested me, dictated also by the publisher's need to fill that space.

I was never an enthusiastic caricaturist, nor was I very interested in the artists—some of them excellent—who dedicated themselves to this discipline, which I find too explicit. I use "caricatural" traits here and there in my work, but I don't like so-called "political humor," which I find uninteresting, pontificating, and ultimately only reflecting a dead era. The only one for whom I have boundless admiration is Daumier, especially for his painted terracotta works (portraits of late 19th-century politicians) which are at the Musée d'Orsay.

A good number of your works take the form of comic strips. Is this your preferred means of expression?

No, I started out as a reader, making comics seemed to me like an exhausting, very hard job. Here again, I would say that I like to operate as an experimenter with styles and languages. But if I had to define myself, I wouldn't say I'm a comic book author; I'm someone who enters that world to conduct research using images and words. I am a maverick. I'm not the kind of guy who desperately wants his characters to be successful and his books to sell thousands of copies. I want the medium to advance.

The style of your comics is quite experimental and tied to elements of pictorial origin. Isn't that perilous? Doesn't it limit you to an audience of specialists, of refined connoisseurs?

Yes, I admit that my way of developing a comic strip is a bit complicated for the mass public, but I can neither avoid nor do I wish to avoid this particularity. At one time, I had a theory based on the fact that, as a descendant of illiterate European peasants, I despised the "flat," structured, and rational conception of the middle classes, from which the buyers of this type of product basically come. So, with my work, I was messing with them a bit, I was enacting a small class vengeance, you see?

Now, I'm not so sure, but perhaps there's a little bit of that because, thank God, I hold a grudge. Furthermore, I almost always address an imaginary audience, namely the Argentine who, beyond all crises, has always possessed an open and complex mental structure, contradictory, prone to psychoanalysis, characterized by a certain perversion. One must not forget that in the 60s, while young Argentines were reading Breccia and Oesterheld, crossing paths in the street with Hugo Pratt (who lived here), in Europe they were consuming Tex, Tintin, and Asterix—good products on the whole, although resolutely commercial.

In the field of comics, you are primarily known for both drawing and writing your stories. How do you organize your work?

Generally, the story emerges from the contemplation of drawings that offer me possibilities, although sometimes the trigger is a memory, an obsession, well, any element that catches my attention, for example my cats (Fantagas).

Regarding how I build stories from pre-existing drawings, the process is quite simple. I try to make them coexist in a specific context and even if, taken separately, they don't amount to much, when I "imprison" them in an environment, relationships inevitably establish themselves—that is to say, a story.

Speaking of obsessions, in Morts et Châtiments (Albin Michel), there is a chapter where there seems to be a Popeye and an Olive Oyl... naked.

Yes, exactly, that's what I was telling you, it's a classic childhood obsession. As a child, I was in love with Olive Oyl and I took advantage of one of those stories to undress her. Mocking the puritanical moral dogma, Segar introduced a character far more subversive than Betty Boop. Olive Oyl was desired (and pawed at) by Popeye, Wimpy, Bluto, and even by Popeye's father, an old boor. And what is incredible is that she didn't disdain any possibility, she was a fan of intra-family promiscuity!

In a way, I too would have liked to do something to her; I was tired of putting up with her indifference. And allow me another digression regarding comics and their link to other arts. Those who do "performances," "installations," "interventions," etc., dream of involving the spectator in their work. If there is an art in action that offers this possibility, it is the comic strip. The only obstacle to its recognition—an obstacle that theorists couldn't care less about—is hierarchical, you see? It's completely idiotic, a bit like seriously believing in kings and princesses.

Do you assimilate the comic strip into a particular literary genre? To the short story, for example?

No, I believe it relates more to poetry. It's a point of view.

I'm thinking back to the question of style. I seem to sometimes detect, in these drawings, a mixture of brutality and elegance. How can these two aspects be reconciled?

As you know, some have described our country as "swarming." This rather pejorative definition should actually refer to the great variety of ethnicities, cross-breeding, and diverse influences that define us. Just like it happens in other societies, doesn't it? These are strata that are not yet hardened, that clash, still in the process of consolidating. Elegance perhaps does not compete with brutality; the two coexist as best they can and as they should.

This mixture is quite common here...

Yes, I was thinking of certain stylistic exercises where the two tendencies mix, during the initiatory periods of youth. I remember one of these exercises that we practiced in two stages, in high school, maybe you remember? The first stage consisted of delivering an oratorical piece with philosophical and poetic content to a girl.

It could also be a theory, a thought, a poem, well, that sort of thing—a speech with some depth, as well-structured as possible, in the most sophisticated language possible. To conclude, feigning a fortuitous gesture, you touched her breasts, which constituted the final stage, the true objective of the whole operation.

If she reacted by slapping you, it meant you had failed the first part. If, on the other hand, she acted as if nothing had happened, it was obvious proof that she was still under the spell of the address and didn't dare break the enchantment of the moment with a prosaic, down-to-earth observation. Some of my classmates developed tirades so perfect that they lost sight of the final goal. In love with their own speech, they forgot about the breasts. Once adults, they became politicians or charlatans.

We are now reaching the end of this interview, and, since this book is a book of sketches, I would like to conclude with the transcription of a text that you yourself wrote for the catalog of an exhibition where you displayed sketches and scribbles—that is to say, the kitchen, the preparations that precede the publishable original. Many of these works were sketches rejected by publishers, drawings destined never to see the light of day. The exhibition was called "The Backyard." It is a text a bit too sentimental for my taste, but the theme is approached in an interesting way in it.

It's because I am a sentimentalist; I play tough so it doesn't show. Yes, that could be a good ending, because that exhibition was conceived in the same spirit as this book.

Thank you. I wish you a good evening, then.

Good evening, and thank you.

Sketches and scribbles, a tribute to the backyard.

In old houses, and even today, there is a backyard covered by a small awning where one tosses the junk that no longer belongs in the presentable part of the house.

The pride of this exhibition is drawn from the enormous quantity of scattered papers that every draftsman accumulates in his studio.

Drawings that one does for pure pleasure, just to try. The ones nobody sees or publishes.

They are natural children, fathered who knows with what mysterious woman whose name is lost in the night of oblivion.

Also exhibited here are the poor tracing papers and sketches which undoubtedly grumble bitterly, between a puff of a cigarette and a sip of mate, about the brilliant career of such and such color original, an ingrate who didn't even send a postcard from Europe to remember his folks.

Generally, one shows the finished work; one is not accustomed to exhibiting hesitations, abortions, or nightmares.

It is worth remembering that our brother Goya committed humble etchings to capture the obsessions that robbed him of sleep. It was only at the end of his life that he dared to paint them on the walls of his house. He had to become old and disillusioned to muster the necessary courage.

Do not be harsh on these poor street urchins. Do not be afraid of their rudimentary appearance, their disheveled hair, and their snot. Remember that they are orphans wandering about and who generally get kicked out from everywhere.

Sometimes they are tough because they have a very strict code of honor. When one of them is selected, polished up, colored, and published, these scumbags try to forget him. Because they know what is bound to happen. It is said that sometimes, the sketches and scribbles gather in gangs and collectively go destroy some originals who, convinced they were born in a cabbage, have forgotten their origins. Poor clumsy fools.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you no more and no less than the backyard.