Guillermo Mordillo (1932–2019) Argentine cartoonist, a recognized master of his genre, whose works have deservedly received many awards. And for good reason: Mordillo's cartoons successfully combine absurd and high-quality humor with original and eye-pleasing drawing.
They are understandable to people all over the world, since Mordillo has abandoned the saving clouds with inscriptions. Favorite topics: sports, especially football - after all, Mordillo is an Argentine artist, and football there is something akin to religion. However, he also makes fun of the relationships between men and women, some everyday troubles, various fairy-tale characters and animals. Many of his caricatures resemble frames from a cartoon, with a typically "cartoonish" humor.
This is also supported by the original manner of depicting his characters: with large noses, rounded lines, bright colors and a somewhat childish stylization. Although many of his caricatures are intended for adults and raise quite serious issues. But it is impossible to call Mordillo a merciless satirist: he rather laughs frivolously than tries to focus attention on some shortcomings.
Guillermo was born in Buenos Aires. His father worked as an ordinary electrician, and his mother as a domestic servant. It goes without saying that they lived in poverty, and the future cartoonist’s main pastime was playing street football. Incidentally, he retained his love for this sport throughout his life and often addressed it in his cartoons, since such a theme always found a lively response among Argentine viewers. Young Mordillo’s favorite actors were Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. But he was no less impressed by the absurd comic numbers of the American comedians the Marx Brothers.
However, he had to make ends meet with odd jobs and hone his skills for another two years before Mordillo began working at the animation studio “Burone Bruché”. But the artist’s main success came from his cartoons, which were eagerly bought by leading Argentine newspapers and magazines. As a result, he was offered a position as a full-time cartoonist at the newspaper “La Naciòn”.
In 1955, Mordillo decided to move to Peru, where he began working as a designer at the large advertising agency McCann Erickson. There he became seriously interested in golf and his passion for this "entertainment for the rich" was embodied in many of his cartoons.
Five years later, Mordillo, who really wanted to work as an animator and create cartoons, moved to the United States, wanting to start working with Disney. But the only job he could find was at Paramount Pictures, where he worked as an animator on the cartoons Popeye and Little Lulu. However, Mordillo got tired of drawing hundreds of monotonous drawings based on ready-made scripts; there was little creativity in this, more purely technical work, and the pay was not very high.
In search of a better opportunity to apply his talents, Mordillo moved to Paris. There he designed greeting cards, but at some point something went wrong, the artist was fired and there was a real threat of an inglorious return to his homeland, since life in Paris was already becoming unaffordable for Mordillo. However, his friend convinced the artist to send his caricatures to several French magazines. Guillermo did not really know French, communicated through an interpreter or with gestures, and therefore decided to do without any inscriptions, leaving only a laconic and easy-to-read drawing at first glance. This is how his signature style was formed, which brought him worldwide fame.
His works were noticed and loved, they were published by popular French magazines, including "Paris Match", "Lui, Marie Claire". After some time, the famous German magazine "Stern" wanted to collaborate with Mordillo. He became one of the most respected and famous caricaturists in the world, that is, in the words of the artist, "he received a pass to the major league".
Mordillo had a masterful way of choosing the most effective point of view in his caricatures; he was not afraid to use panoramic perspective and a bird's eye view, as in the famous work "The Individualist", where he surrealistically ridiculed the attempt to impose a universal single opinion and a single view of the surrounding reality.
It was his tribute to his love for football, and, according to the artist, creating each such drawing gave him considerable pleasure. It was sports caricatures, the peak of popularity of which came before major tournaments, such as the World Cup, that attracted the greatest number of people to Mordillo's work. Few newspapers and magazines in the 1970s and 1980s denied themselves the pleasure of publishing another small absurdist masterpiece by the artist.
His humor allows to awaken the "inner child" in adult viewers, since it is better suited for understanding by children's perception. And many of his caricatures should be examined more closely, since their meaning and the situation depicted can be so bizarre that they are not always read at first glance.
The characters in his caricatures are as impersonal as possible, but this was to some extent a plus for the artist: he did not become a hostage to his most successful characters, and his caricatures are associated directly with Mordillo himself, and not with their heroes.
Mordillo spent the last years of his life in Monaco and said, not without a bit of irony, that Monte Carlo was the most boring place on earth and that if he were younger, he would never live there. But in old age, you want peace, and there is plenty of it there. Even at 80, he did not abandon creativity, drawing more for himself and his soul than for money, although he still took it extremely seriously, worked on each drawing for a long time, building a composition and bringing the emerging idea to the ideal. However, it was precisely this approach that contributed, along with talent, to the artist's success. “Never rush and do everything well” - it is difficult not to agree with these words and Mordillo's life principle.
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