It’s difficult to ignore the aesthetically pleasing, inspiring pictures with accompanying texts that have filled social media feeds in recent years. Almost everyone nowadays is ready to share their newly acquired wisdom; what they charge for this varies depending on the proven usefulness (read: impudence) of the guides they offer to surviving in the modern world. Meditation, positive thinking, personal-effectiveness marathons, self-therapy guides, self-help checklists, routines drawn up by neurobiologists or ‘that girl guy’ influencers. The emphasis on positive thinking, a supportive tone, calming formulations, and the cultivation of a person’s intrinsic value – these crutches seem to be the new fuel. The question is: can these instruments really help in real life, which is so problematic, cruel, corrupt, depraved, and frequently senseless? Or instead of the softly-softly approach, do we need the shock therapy of no-beating-about-the-bush caustic truth – from which the salvation lies in escapism?

Joan Cornellà stands ready with an alternative response: a special kind of art therapy. Let the séance begin.

If your recommendations feed has ever confronted you with images of pink-cheeked people with a vacant gaze and a thin-lipped smile, they’re probably ordinary users of social media. Under their posts you’ll find something life-affirming or, at the very least, something whose seriousness and ideal quality is guaranteed to get on your nerves.

The figures in Cornellà’s works smile almost as falsely as the people we see every day. But unlike the latter, they surround themselves with circumstances so revolting that they can hardly be described. The way they react to the scenarios in which they find themselves is the absolute opposite of public norms. 

Joan Cornellà Vázquez’ career in art started with social criticism. He was born in Barcelona on 11 January 1981. After studying fine art at university, he continued developing traditions that have deep roots in Spanish culture.

Abulio, Cornellà’s first comic, was based on the principal of esperpento – which started out as a literary style in Spanish literature depicting reality in a distorted, grotesque manner. Distortion and undermining of familiar reality, erosion of the boundaries between reality and caricature: this is how esperpento authors critique reality and the society that lives in it. The figurative language used in Abulio is radically different from Cornellà’s present style. It’s all about failures, those ‘little men’ in works by Gogol or Kafka. Black-and-white artwork and characters drawn in detail – like in underground comics by Robert Crumb. Nervous lines drawn by a sharp pen, principal characters that are ugly caricatures – Crumb’s post-LSD phobias are particularly psychedelic.

Cornellà’s work is closer to magic realism. Taking prototypes for his characters from real life, he hyperbolizes and simultaneously mocks their flaws and weaknesses. He does not eschew black humour but likewise refrains from descending into marginality. The year after Abulio was created, it was published as an album by Glenat, winning Cornellà the Joseph Coll Prize for authors under the age of 30. This achievement allowed him to publish his illustrations and comics in various newspapers and the magazine El Jueves.

Tactically, Cornellà did the right thing by deciding not to place his text in ‘clouds’. This classic cartoon element makes it possible to tell stories but is a linguistic barrier that prevents comic strips reaching a multinational audience. By depriving his characters of the ability to speak in cartoons that are wordless, Cornellà puts the emphasis on his characters’ actions – a kind of comic-strip take on a Charlie Chaplin comedy. In this silent comedy the black humour becomes even more incisive and shocking.

Cornellà’s characters are unwitting puppets with a mask-like indeterminacy frozen on their faces. They furiously imitate control over what’s happening, but in actual fact their obtuse smiles conceal anxious anticipation of imminent horror. The pressure is felt particularly strongly in the six-frame comic strips: we can follow how the comic strip begins, but its end is a complete mystery. The characters’ actions are automatised and, it seems, not under their own control – as is the case with many of us. But who’s will is controlling them? The will of the author, the artist, the creator, surroundings, society – take your pick.

Cornellà takes this further, rejecting the black-and-white comic-strip standard established by the American artist Michael Kuppperman. His inspiration comes more from the graphic art of Raymond Pettibon and the format of the graphic diary – full of caustic and satirical commentary as the image develops. Just as Pettibon is not embarrassed by lack of originality – on the contrary, it’s a way for him to validate his own insignificance – so Cornellà sees self-abasement and recognition of human irrelevance as a way of talking to the general public in the most direct manner.    

Cornellà allows his characters to keep silent, placing them in the most antihuman, extraordinary events – events which nevertheless regularly happen in real life. Killings, suicides, concealment of crimes, lying by politicians, abuse of power, race and gender conflicts, ageism, abortions, cannibalism, dismembering, maiming, sectarianism, addictions, including to social media and the masturbational habit of taking selfies – Cornellà uses everything that is most prohibited, everything you don’t want to know or, at least, don’t want to see, as unconventional scenarios for his characters. He accompanies his images with texts that are a kind of general commentary on what is happening. The only difference is that these are the humiliating, dirty, depraved thoughts that we usually avoid and never say out loud.

These sarcastic phrases, whose meaning jars with the dimples on the characters’ cheeks, form posters for non-existent films. ‘We are all pathetic’: a huddle of identical men; ‘I hate everyone’: a pretty girl against the background of a relaxing mountainscape.

If you ever had the pleasure of dining in a Soviet canteen, you probably remember the posters that hung in places calling upon you to act in approved and effective ways. Cornellà’s posters are the opposite: ‘Run from your responsibilities’, ‘Stay mediocre’, ‘Never stop giving up’, ‘The universe doesn’t care a damn about you’, ‘You can. But please don’t’, ‘Today is not your day’, and so on. Cornellà simultaneously overturns a number of generational cultural codes: the ingrained habit of thinking positively, the pursuit of public interest, pathological faith in oneself, and so on. His post-ironic pictures are a poisonous antidote to the affirmations of success that fill millennials’ social-media accounts. This is comic-strip surrealism with elements of violence – as a response to the existential fear that feeds on our deepest and most superficial anxieties.

Cornellà takes his range of colours from the pleasant visuals of meme affirmations. Given the eventfulness of his comic strips, there is no way that this aestheticized range of colours could become excessively refined. The luminous pastel poster colours also allude to advertising and information pamphlets from the 1950s. It is as if a howling existentialism from paintings by Francis Bacon has found its way into mass print, only in the opposite form – the false smiles and cracked joie de vivre you see in in-flight leaflets will survive even in the event of a plane crash. It seems that the excessiveness and nervy repetitiveness of pop art are just such an attempt to cope with the crisis of existence…

Cornellà drags onto the surface all our archetypal fears, and in a fairly tactless manner – which some people will even find insulting – he voices them out loud. He does not try to normalize them, but nor does he rush to condemn them. He insistently demonstrates and manifests them, reminding us of the strange world in which we are forced to exist and of the strange decisions that sometimes occur to us. Being blanketed in such total, malicious grotesquery equalizes each member of modern society in his or her individual irregularity, weakness, and depravity. More: this process reveals timeless, eternal human vices. Stupidity, vanity, greed, vengefulness, egocentrism: all this can be found with different degrees of allegoricality in Bruegel’s Proverbs. But Cornellà manages to mock all this in a way that is closer to life, and this makes it all the sadder.

Cornellà’s visual gags with their unattractive endings deliberately rub our noses in all the evil that exists in man. Human-like characters and the Frankensteins of Goya, the soloist Aphex Twin, and a random passer-by from the real world keep on ending up in macabre situations so as to console and calm us, however paradoxical that may sound.

The uneasy feelings that are aroused by these horrors in an innocent range of colours are temporary and transient but necessary. To nurture resistance to ‘the worst possible‘ in life. To sober us up when we indulge in unrealistic expectations. And to liberate us from disappointment. At the very least, when you find ‘Remember, your life is pointless’ in your feed, you’ll stop feeling so lonely. At most, this is just the kick in the butt we all need.