Coté Escrivá was born in Valencia in Spain in 1982. Valencia has never skimped on developing human art resources. For the big picture, think, for instance, of the admittedly not very many members of the southern wing of Impressionism – Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio Pinazo, who foreshadowed Sorolla’s style; or the sculptor Julio González, who often worked with Picasso; or Miguel Navarro, famous for his enormous tubular monuments. At the other end of the scale, look at Valencia’s cityscape: its walls teem with street art that seems a harmonious extension of the multichromatic patterns of the city’s traditional tilework.
Escrivá mainly spent his time observing artists who were closer to him in terms of style and chronology. In interviews he says he has been especially influenced by the work of Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Brian Donnelly, and Gary Baseman. Which is why he opted to pursue design and illustration as opposed to classical crafts. He studied at the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Polytechnical University of Valencia. After graduating, he started working as a freelance designer of prints for T-shirts and tried his hand at painting walls and creating design projects for display cases and shops (these are, it seems, unofficially mandatory stages in artists’ initiation rites.) This soon disappointed him, however, and he returned to his beloved sketching and graphic art:
From the very first works that, following what is now accepted practice, Escrivá published in social media, we see him using a number of stylistic techniques. He takes cult figures from popular culture: Mickey Mouse, characters from the Peanuts comic strip (he’s particularly fond of Snoopy and his best friend Woodstock), SpongeBob, Astro Bob, Mario, characters from the Simpsons, the Smurfs, etc. Nor does he spare figures from the art scene – Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs, for instance. All these he systematically passes through his filter, in the same way that the frames in a storyboard follow one another in a certain order.
The first thing that stands out in Escrivá’s art is that he strips his figures of richness – literally by drawing them without using colour. This approach combines Escrivá’s little-known experience as a tattoo artist with allusions to the old black-and-white Disney cartoons of the 1920s. Escrivá crosses Mickey Mouse whistling his song at the helm of Steamboat Willie with the lively, jerking bags of bones from Disney’s The Skeleton Dance.
The Skeleton Dance was Disney’s skilful infantilization of a traditional theme found in medieval painting: the Dance of Death or danse macabre. Mass-reproduced on cemetery walls, in sepulchres and churches, and on the façades of residential street blocks, the danse macabre tells people (not for the first time, but as a reminder) of the overall futility of life and of the inexorability of its end. Regardless of origin, age, and status, bony Death, whirling its subjects in a dance, leads them to the grave. This is an edifying scene, a kind of memento mori.
In Walt Disney’s interpretation the danse macabre obviously has a more entertaining function: the skeletons are not leading anyone anywhere; they’re glad to shake their bones around the graves, do circle dances, and make merry. But only until their revelry is interrupted by the morning cockcrow. The use of Edvard Grieg’s March of the Trolls as musical accompaniment defuses anything that might have remained of a sense of horror. This contradictory mood of harmless, even playful hooliganism is preserved in Escrivá’s stylized characters too. This is like a child’s naughtiness that is taken only to the point where it has not yet ceased to make us melt in tenderness.
In the same way that Disney turns an edifying (and for some people soul-saving) topic into a five-minute-long animated joke, Escrivá reveals in these so-familiar characters aspects that viewers of traditional cartoons never get to see. Just as Mickey Mouse, the embodiment of optimism and friendliness, subsequently acquires coarse, ‘grown-up’ traits, so Escrivá endows cartoon and comics icons with mortality in the literal sense of the word. He moves them from the category of eternal entity and seemingly immortal companion to the plane of ordinary human life. He does not, though, drain them of energy or ingenuousness. How else can naïve images from childhood be turned into an attractive product for nostalgic adults?
Re-assembling images taken from pop culture is not exactly an innovative approach. Works by the young American artist Ryan Travis Christian, for instance, have something of the same quality in terms of style. Christian’s chiaroscuro interpretations of Disney characters resemble what Escrivá does, with one conceptually important difference: the balance between humour and cruelty. The similarity ends at precisely the moment when the characters in Christian’s works stop flirting and what has until now been simply black humour turns to masked horror. On an imaginary scale ‘from harmless black humour to creepiness on the verge of disgusting’ works by Christian and Escrivá would be at opposite ends.
The explanation for such diametrically opposite readings of the same motifs lies in the artists’ cultural background – or to be more precise, in how Spanish-speaking countries treat death. On the Spanish map of the world, death is regarded simultaneously as both end and beginning. One of the purposes of traditional carnival festivities linked to death is to strip its image of all pomp, seriousness, and fear. The more lavish the altar, the richer the ochre of the marigolds, and the louder the exclamations during the funeral procession – the more grandly and less tragically this natural stage in human life is perceived. Like Tim Burton’s classic Corpse Bride, whose purpose is to laugh loud in the face of death. This is a leitmotif that may be seen in Escrivá’s graphic art and objects.
Skeletal Mickey playing with a yo-yo; SpongeBob wielding a rake to clear leaves at the cemetery; Pinocchio with roots growing out of him; Donald Duck as a zombie: in such characters, amusement wins out over fear, and the symbols of death are endowed with comic interpretations.
Incidentally, on the subject of symbols. The skull is something Escrivá lays bare in almost all his characters. He gives several of them a meta-interpretation of the skull – with a generalized bottom jaw borrowed from Brian Donnelly’s Companions.
The depiction of the skull in art is usually bound up with the dichotomy of life and death. A classic example is the vanitas genre of still-life. In today’s world, however, the skull is in the process of acquiring a new associative structure that links it to the world of fashion – in particular, houses of haute couture. Trends in art often coincide with, or even predetermine, the vectors along which other creative fields will develop. In this context we cannot help thinking of the platinum mould of a human skull created by Damien Hirst in 2007 and encrusted with 8601 diamonds. For the Love of God may be abbreviated as FLOG – meaning ‘sell off quickly or cheaply’. The glinting skull is a deliberately commercialized interpretation of the theme of death: almost gypsy kitsch whose vulgarity, behind the gleams of precious stones, mocks the prices and values of the contemporary art market.
Several years later, skulls appeared in collections by Alexander McQueen. Philipp Plein launched his own brand of clothes with a skull almost identical to Hirst’s sculpture as its principal logo. Later, as usually happens, the trend for using an image of the skull reached the wider market and became part of the identity of street brands, brands founded by celebrities, and indie brands. And although it might have seemed that the period of booming Gothic subcultures was already over, use of the skull remains to this day an effective way to communicate with a specific audience anywhere – preferably one that is fashionable and has money to spend.
Of course, no instruments of creative PR can be compared with an offer to team up with Medicom Toy. The Bearbrick decorated with a print of a Mickey Mouse skeleton was a combination that brought Escrivá’s work to a wider audience. And for those who resist popular movements, Escrivá has more customary forms of art.
A small series of his paintings flirts with his beloved aesthetic of the American comic. Silhouettes resembling poses from classic Westerns are filled with comics-style clouds, moving lines of dialogue, and explosive sounds. We see only the poses and gestures of the characters in the action, but their ‘content/narrative’ speaks for them. Here Escrivá does not so much deconstruct the images of pop culture as use them as a canvas. He entwines, removes, discolours, turns up saturation to the maximum, focuses, compresses into a raster – all so as to discover among these fluctuations a point, a line, or a spot where the effect will be simultaneously creepy and amusing.