a character is born, learn the story behind matéman
matéman, that character who never appears drinking mate, but is always about to drink mate, or has already drunk it in absurd situations, or especially ordinary ones. Written in lowercase and with an accent on purpose, or maybe not, matéman seeks to make you laugh, convey serenity and humility in hectic and confusing times.
matéman screen printing, Juanchila, 2019.3.31, The Common House, London.
matéman was born on December 13, 2018, without a capital letter, during a work meeting. I was tired of listening to the bullshit my then boss was saying, so I started making circles and stripes with my BIC pen on a notebook.
The first drawing of matéman was but three lines: ‘–_–’. 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 when I lived in Shanghai. Tzuki is drawn with very thick lines, their eyes two horizontal black lines, their 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. That’s when I decided to draw a mate and a kettle with hot water, but not boiling! (Between 70ºC and 85ºC… so as to please the various schools). In short, I now had a character.
First 6 matéman doodles on a work notebook, Redruth, Cornwall, England, 13.12.2018 (CC 2023, Juanchila).
Not long after came his name, a name which, for many reasons, had to be one of an antihero. Let’s see, the guy is bald, has a beer belly, wears almost always slippers or flip-flops (those are easier to draw), and lives badly shaved with an eternal three-day beard. Although I didn’t know it then, matéman was a kind of alter-ego, a projection plane of my changing psycho-emotional and physical-testo-hormonal states. After several absurd ideas, ‘mateman’ 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 ‘mateman’ sounds like meitman). So, I decided on matéman. Grammatically incorrect, I immediately knew there would be objections. Solution? ‘matéman’ would always be written in lowercase, singular, and with an accent on the ‘é’, while the word ‘mate’ 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 matéman as a caricature was inspired from the beginning by two Argentine artists that my parents and their friends appreciate very much: Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, ‘Quino’, and Roberto Alfredo Fontanarrosa. From Quino, his eternal Mafalda and her satirical take on “serious” 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 Martín Fierro by José Hernández. In this latter work, one of his last, Fontanarrosa makes use of small contextual arrows to explain things that are rather obvious. For example, a singled out bird drawn on the margin of a page and an arrow with the text ‘lonely bird’.
While matéman drawings may vary, in technique and material, there is a non-negotiable canon, matémanisation process to them: matéman must always appear, without exception, with a mate, a thermos and at least one “context-explanatory” arrow. matéman never appears drinking mate, but he is always about to drink mate, or he has already drunk it.
“Don’t forget to laugh a little every day!” Chidoro, my old man, once told me for my 28th birthday; “You don’t have to swim in the deep, but you don’t have to stay on the shore either!” or something along those lines goes one of Luci, my mom’s, ‘Phoenician recipes’. matéman is about that: 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.
For Chidoro, my old man
For Luci, my mum
matéman exists thanks to the earthly and cosmic 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.