Idol Award Laureate 2013 1
The German playwright and poet Bertold Brecht wro
te that the first duty of theater was to entertain. I feel that under Isol’s aesthetics lies a similar saying: Forbidden to bore! I On that bases she builds the rest: sharp themes and treatments, technical invention, unforgettable characters and atmospheres. And something very unusual in picture books: Isol has an enormous capacity to make visible the psychology of the characters. They don’t look all alike, each one has its own personality, intentions, particular moods. Isol’s work recreates children’s thoughts and aims, in a way she reinvents childhood. Reading her books we understand that children have a complex and richer universe than those presented in the majority of books addressed to them. Jorge Luján, author ries between pictorial art, music, design and poetry, and this too resonates in her books. Isol’s works contain extreme elements, fun elements and unpredictable elements. There is humour, too, and an ability to create visual narratives with surprising twists in both form and content. In the mildly absurd El globo (2002), the angry, loud-mouthed mother is transformed into a balloon that her daughter can hold on a string while out for a walk. She meets another girl who is out with her mother. “What a lovely balloon!” says the other girl. “Yes, and what a lovely mummy!” replies the daughter. When they part, they each think, “Oh well, you can’t have everything!” Petit, el monstruo (2007) is about a boy who cannot figure out why people like you and think you are nice one moment, and then the next moment scold you for doing more or less the same thing. In her illustrations, Isol uses a sophisticated technique of double outlines and shadows to underline this ambivalence. Maternal relationships and family secrets are a recurring theme throughout Isol’s works, as in Secreto de familia (2003), where a child discovers that even her friends and classmates try to conceal what their mothers get up to at home when no-one is watching. Fatal beauty is the theme of La bella Griselda (2010), a cruel but humorous tale about a series of suitors who literally lose their heads in front of the beautiful princess Griselda. One day, she suffers the same fate herself in front of her own daughter, an equally beautiful little princess. The Argentinian poet Jorge Luján, who lives in Mexico, suggested early on in Isol’s career that she should draw comic strips based on his scripts. The result was an exquisite series, Equis y Zeta, the first volume of which appeared in 2000. This was where Isol discovered the thin, nervous, slightly broken line, the muted colour palette and the pareddown style, which she went on to develop both in subsequent works co-authored with Luján and in her own picturebooks. This style is frequently characterized by double outlines and deliberate print misregistration, where the lines and colours are not completely aligned. Isol sets out to reproduce this common phenomenon in graphic art, since it reminds her of the old picturebooks her grandmother gave her as a child: “They were often worn and sun-bleached. I like to start with a yellow, sun-bleached colour, to create a similar timeless quality, and then add one or two clearer colours as a kind of accent”, she explains. Isol often emphasizes the importance of artistic technique to the overall experience of a book, pointing out that it has narrative qualities in itself. Her aesthetic is as easy to recognize as it is hard to define, as she herself says. It is based on layers of conscious choices, in which drawing is a powerful tool able to express something that cannot