{"id":1073,"date":"2022-04-05T22:35:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T22:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/?page_id=1073"},"modified":"2022-05-21T13:11:20","modified_gmt":"2022-05-21T13:11:20","slug":"asinace-en","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/projects\/mateman\/asinace\/asinace-en\/","title":{"rendered":"a character is born"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fran\u00e7ais<\/a> | Espa\u00f1ol<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"mat\u00e9man<\/figure>
\n

mat\u00e9man, <\/em>written in lowercase and with an accent, on purpose or maybe not, seeks to make you laugh, convey serenity and humility in hectic and confusing times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

mat\u00e9man serigraf\u00eda, Juanchila<\/em><\/strong>, 2019.3.31, creado en The Common House<\/a>, Londres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\"Creative<\/a>
mat\u00e9man and other illustrations by Juanchila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Where does mat\u00e9man come from?<\/h4>\n

mat\u00e9man was born on December 13, 2018, without a capital letter, during a work meeting. I was tired of listening to the bullshit of my then boss, so I started making circles and stripes with my BIC pen on a notebook.<\/p>\n

The first drawing of mat\u00e9man was but three lines: \u201c-_-\u201c. Two things inspired those lines. The first was the use by several of my then colleagues of the Expressionless Face<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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 while living in Shanghai. Tzuki<\/em> is drawn with very thick lines, his eyes two horizontal black lines, his 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\u2019s when I decided to draw a mate and an aluminium kettle with hot water (not boiling! Between 70\u00baC and 85\u00baC\u2026 there are different schools). I had a character.<\/p>\n

Not long after came his name, a name which, for many reasons, had to be one of an antihero. \u2019I guy is bald, has a beer belly, almost always wears slippers, flip-flops or flip flops, and lives badly shaved with an eternal three-day beard. Although I \u2019idn’t know it then, mat\u00e9man was a kind of alter-ego, a projection plane of my changing psycho-emotional and physical-testo-hormonal states. After several absurd ideas, \u2018mateman\u2019 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 \u2018mateman\u2019 sounds like meitman<\/em>). So, I decided on mat\u00e9man. I knew immediately that it was grammatically incorrect and there would be objections. The solution? \u2018mat\u00e9man\u2019 would always be in lowercase, singular, and with an accent on the \u2018\u00e9\u2019, while the word \u2018mate\u2019 would never have an accent (except in the translation of the descriptions).<\/p>\n

In each of my drawings I try to learn from other artists, but the development of mat\u00e9man as a caricature was inspired from the beginning by two Argentine artists that my parents and their friends followed: Joaqu\u00edn Salvador Lavado Tej\u00f3n, \u2018Quino,\u2019 and Roberto Alfredo \u2018El Negro\u2019 Fontanarrosa. From Quino, his eternal Mafalda<\/em> and her satirical take o\u201cn “ser\u201dous” social issues that I subtly try to integrate into some of my drawings. From Fontanarrosa, his Inodoro Pereyra<\/em> and Boogie, el aceitoso<\/em>, and above all his illustration, in 2004, of the epic poem El Gaucho Mart\u00edn Fierro<\/em> by Jos\u00e9 Rafel Hern\u00e1ndez. In this work, one of his last, Fontanarrosa makes use of arrows and text to explain obvious things. For example, a bird drawn on the margin of a page and an arrow with the t\u2018xt ‘lonely \u2019ird’.<\/p>\n

My drawings are always different, but there is a non-negotiable canon: mat\u00e9man must always appear, without exception, with a mate, a thermos and at least \u201cne “explana\u201dory” arrow. Mat\u00e9man never appears drinking<\/em> mate, but he is always about to drink<\/em> or has already drunk <\/em>mat\u00e9.<\/p>\n

“Don’t forget to laugh a little every day!\u201d Chidoro, my old man, once told me for my 28th birthday; <\/em>\u201cYou don’t have to swim in the deep, but you don’t have to stay on the shore either!\u201d or something along those lines goes one of Luci, my mom\u2019s, Phoenician ‘recipes’. mat\u00e9man is about these things: 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.<\/p>\n

mat\u00e9man exists thanks to the omnipotent presences and energies of Elona and Nawel, of Chidoro and Luci, of Sole, Guada, Andr\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n

Y ya ‘t\u00e1, pues.<\/p>\n

Juanchila, 12.2.2022<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fran\u00e7ais | Espa\u00f1ol Where does mat\u00e9man come from? mat\u00e9man was born on December 13, 2018, without a capital letter, during a work meeting. I was tired of listening to the bullshit of my then boss, so I started making circles and stripes with my BIC pen on a notebook. The first drawing of mat\u00e9man was…<\/p>\n Read More<\/span> a character is born<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":461,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1073"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1127,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1073\/revisions\/1127"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesidewalks.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}