This series of illustrations inspired by VOGUING is not only a tribute to this dance born from the New York Afro-American LGTB communities, it is also a look back and a manifesto as a graphic artist committed to Queer culture.
In 1994, I met Carmen Xtravanganza and thanks to my friendship with her, I understood even better the beauty, the pain, the dignity, the irony, and the magnificent act of reclamation that lay behind this mythical dance and the community that created it.
Together with Carmen, I made one of my first illustrations for what was going to be the first BALLROOM in Madrid. But the project fell through, too expensive, too ambitious, and risky for the time. However, this experience sowed in me the desire to dedicate myself to graphic illustration.
My encounter in the late nineties with the founders of Shangay magazine was decisive and marked my starting point as an illustrator, becoming a crucial axis of my artistic career.
Thanks to my colleagues at Shangay, I have been able to illustrate and vindicate the values or the very contradictions of our LGBTQ culture, to be a participant in its evolution, and to celebrate its diversity.
With this series of Old & New way Voguing poses and these nods to this collaboration, I return to my roots and this inexhaustible source of inspiration and expression that is and always was dance in our community.
These illustrations are in some way all those I would have created for these BALLROOM for Carmen if her project had gone ahead and my admiring gaze towards the new generations for propelling Queer culture to the highest spheres of popular culture.
