matéman, written in lowercase and with an accent, on purpose or maybe not, seeks to make you laugh, convey serenity and humility in hectic and confusing times.
matĂ©man serigrafĂa, Juanchila, 2019.3.31, creado en The Common House, Londres.
matéman and other illustrations by Juanchila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Where does matéman come from?
matéman was born on December 13, 2018, without a capital letter, during a work meeting. I was tired of listening to the bullshit of my then boss, so I started making circles and stripes with my BIC pen on a notebook.
The first drawing of matĂ©man was but three lines: â-_-â. Two things inspired those lines. The first was the use by several of my then colleagues of the Expressionless Face emoji, part of Unicode 6.1 in 2012 and added to the version Emoji 1.0 of 2015. Paradoxically, I remember that I was very amused by the expressive intensity of that Emoji, which generated a mixture of frustration, annoyance, serenity, intrigue, attractiveness, and sometimes, depending on the context, malice, mischief, guilt, innocence and sincerity. The second thing that unconsciously inspired those first lines was Tzuki, the cartoon of a rabbit created by Chinese netizen Wang Momo, and that I saw and used for the first time on the Chinese social network WeChat while living in Shanghai. Tzuki is drawn with very thick lines, his eyes two horizontal black lines, his body white and his ears very thin. To those first three lines I then added a small circle as a head, and a beard. And since it was cold that day, I put a scarf on him. Thatâs when I decided to draw a mate and an aluminium kettle with hot water (not boiling! Between 70ÂșC and 85ÂșC⊠there are different schools). I had a character.
Not long after came his name, a name which, for many reasons, had to be one of an antihero. âI guy is bald, has a beer belly, almost always wears slippers, flip-flops or flip flops, and lives badly shaved with an eternal three-day beard. Although I âidn’t know it then, matĂ©man was a kind of alter-ego, a projection plane of my changing psycho-emotional and physical-testo-hormonal states. After several absurd ideas, âmatemanâ came up, but I could not write it without an accent, even if the jokes were going to be in Spanish, I wanted his name to be more universal (in English âmatemanâ sounds like meitman). So, I decided on matĂ©man. I knew immediately that it was grammatically incorrect and there would be objections. The solution? âmatĂ©manâ would always be in lowercase, singular, and with an accent on the âĂ©â, while the word âmateâ would never have an accent (except in the translation of the descriptions).
In each of my drawings I try to learn from other artists, but the development of matĂ©man as a caricature was inspired from the beginning by two Argentine artists that my parents and their friends followed: JoaquĂn Salvador Lavado TejĂłn, âQuino,â and Roberto Alfredo âEl Negroâ Fontanarrosa. From Quino, his eternal Mafalda and her satirical take oân “serâous” social issues that I subtly try to integrate into some of my drawings. From Fontanarrosa, his Inodoro Pereyra and Boogie, el aceitoso, and above all his illustration, in 2004, of the epic poem El Gaucho MartĂn Fierro by JosĂ© Rafel HernĂĄndez. In this work, one of his last, Fontanarrosa makes use of arrows and text to explain obvious things. For example, a bird drawn on the margin of a page and an arrow with the tâxt ‘lonely âird’.
My drawings are always different, but there is a non-negotiable canon: matĂ©man must always appear, without exception, with a mate, a thermos and at least âne “explanaâory” arrow. MatĂ©man never appears drinking mate, but he is always about to drink or has already drunk matĂ©.
“Don’t forget to laugh a little every day!â Chidoro, my old man, once told me for my 28th birthday; âYou don’t have to swim in the deep, but you don’t have to stay on the shore either!â or something along those lines goes one of Luci, my momâs, Phoenician ‘recipes’. matĂ©man is about these things: laughing, which does us so much good, asking questions for which there is not always an answer, and transmitting serenity and humility in these hectic and confusing times.
matéman exists thanks to the omnipotent presences and energies of Elona and Nawel, of Chidoro and Luci, of Sole, Guada, Andrés and Mario, of Kela and Esther, of the families Moreno, Hoover, Ruben, Novak, Casado, Marinsaldi, Bernasconi, Maldonado, Satre, Afonso Suarez and Robertsdotter Berglund, and of countless friends.
Y ya ‘tĂĄ, pues.
Juanchila, 12.2.2022