Joan (pronounced Jo-Anne) Ornella Vazquez is an artist, illustrator, and cartoonist from Spain. He is most famous for his black humour comics that take on a political, social and international undertone. His artwork ranges from ideas and thoughts about death, police brutality and also child abuse (just to name a few.)
Since Joan’s growth on social media, he has started to branch out into more traditional avenues.
Just recently, Joan had a solo showcase of his art in a London exhibit.
It was at the exhibition center at Hoxton Arches were more than 10,000 people visited to take a glance at Joan’s work.
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Some of the pieces can get a little ‘dark’ to say the least but snickers and laughter can still be heard throughout the gallery. And as such, some social media platforms have banned or censored his work.
InstagramIn an interview with Unilad, Joan said: ‘social networks often censor my work, especially Facebook, which takes special care of penises and woman’s nipples. It is something like what religious institutions do, so we could say that Mark Zuckerberg pretends to be something like the cyber pope.’
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He goes on to say that his sporadic portrayals of violence in his art are not a depiction of himself, rather it is of the world.
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‘Violence is inherent to the human being and it is only necessary to open the newspaper every morning to be scandalized by what the human being is capable of.’
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He continued: ‘in them, all evil and absurdity are usually perpetrated by a white man with a tie, so interpretations could go another way.’
InstagramDespite the somewhat lofty price tags of his artwork (smaller pieces are 5,000 pounds whereas the larger pieces can go up to 15,000 pounds), Joan says that the exhibit is still going ‘very well.’
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‘The exhibition is going very well. I have the feeling that my work fits easily here because irony or [the] politically incorrect have a greater acceptance than elsewhere. Traditionally British satire has enjoyed good health and black humour seems commonplace here.’
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