Sketchbook Memoirs

In their final exhibition for 2022, Taipa Village Cultural Association presented TRAVELS, featuring the private sketchbook collections by internationally acclaimed Portuguese illustrator and caricaturist André Carrilho, who depicts a diversity of emblematic landscapes and scenes of the many faces of urban life through his carefully crafted sketches. 

 

In this exhibition, Carrilho showcased his personal works and artistic endeavours through his sketchbooks, which he fills mostly during his travels, offering a multitude of depictions of remote regions in Portugal, international metropolises such as New York, London and Paris, and, closer to home, Macau and Hong Kong. 

 

“It was our honour to invite André to showcase his ingenuity in various kinds of tinted illustrations that evoke people’s remembrances of the places to which they belong,” said João Ó, President of the Executive Board at Taipa Village Cultural Association. “By replicating the correct separation of the different colours detected on the original watercolour artwork on the final risograph print, certain errors occur when printing the superimposition of each image, making each print unique through its imperfection and giving rise to the beauty of risography.”

 

 

“These images are part of a body of work spanning several years with personal works and artistic endeavors. It was a fantastic opportunity for those who know or do not know Carrilho’s work, to see again these magnificent works that were previously exhibited during an earlier edition of the Macau Literary Festival”

 

The artist, who was in Portugal at the time of the opening of the exhibition, noted that “this is an opportunity for the drawings to return to the places where they were made, even if I am not able to do it”.

 

Carrilho’s freehand watercolour drawings typically feature only two or three overlapped colours, creating a high degree of contrast between their backgrounds and foregrounds, giving them increased impact and a strong sense of place. His sketchbook drawings have been published in two editions – Inercia (Inertia) in 2014 and Atrito (Friction) in 2018 – by Portuguese publishing house Abysmo.

 

Carrilho blends techniques from his sketchbook drawings with risograph photocopying and printing. The use of risograph printers, whose manufacture dates back to Japan in 1980, has been increasingly adopted in the past decade by contemporary illustrators and artists who utilise the process’ reproducibility to create distinctive visual effects.

 

In a career spanning 30 years, Carrilho has won more than 100 awards and honours for illustration, editorial cartoons, animation and caricature, and has shown his work in group and solo exhibitions in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, France, the Czech Republic, China and the United States. His work has been published in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Britain’s Independent on Sunday, Switzerland’s NZZ am Sonntag, Portuguese daily newspaper Diário de Notícias and the UK’s New Statesman. In 2002, Carrilho won the Gold Award for Illustrator’s Portfolio by the Society for News Design in the US, one of the world’s most prestigious illustration awards.

 

 

 

Two years ago André Carrilho was invited by Bertrand Publishers to design the cover of a new edition of George Orwell’s 1984, whose rights had come into the public domain. In accepting the challenge, Carrilho made a counter-proposal, going one step further and suggesting an illustrated edition of this classic of literature. The result has just arrived in bookstores with this latest version of Orwell’s dystopian vision including Carrilho’s visual essay to complement this classic text, that, 73 years after its original publication, continues to be highly relevant.

 

“I was aware that this book is a world classic, and I wanted to make my visual, graphic contribution to the best of my ability,” says the artist. “It’s such a well-known book, so debated, so represented, and yet I wanted to give another perspective, because I come from conceptual illustration, and the concepts and things this book talks about interest me, that’s what makes it topical.”

 

“I think you have to protect the relationship that the text has with people, with the reader, allowing the reader to imagine things that are not said in the book. For this very reason, my approach was basically to try to make a picture book for adults,” he adds.

 

“My motivation for doing this book, and the fact that I like it so much, is because I see a lot of parallels with our times. We live in a society that I don’t even know if Orwell himself could have imagined!”