It's official: 2019 was the year of María Medem. Twelve months in which the recognizable (and already renowned) style of this artist appeared even in the most unexpected places. Not only this woman from Sevilla made her Instagram account, with more than a hundred thousand followers, into a must, but she also published her acclaimed comic, Cenit, and joined international collaborations. Her works appeared in the New York Times, a success in itself. She then became particularly famous when several artists from the world of music turned to her to illustrate their albums, from Jay Som's indie album to the more massive indie rock of Bombay Bicylcle Club.
And that's just the beginning. Be as it may, she isn't the only artist with this style. Nor the first one. Large colorful surfaces, unnatural shades and contrasts, neat lines, purity of forms... This is the style of María Medem. A style whose genealogical tree can be traced backwards, leading to two fundamental branches. First, Olivier Schrauwen, illustrator and comic author who became popular thanks to Arsène Schrauwen, a series of graphic novels that portrays the biography of his grandfather, and in which this graphic style is much more than present. And if Olivier comes before Medem, then Raymond Pettibon can be considered as the father of it all. In the end, hasn't Pettibon been the matrix of many other aesthetic trends in the last decades?
Besides Medem, there are many other authors that are halfway between comics and pop art, surfing the wave of comic strip in that sea that separates art from design. Authors like Jesse Jacobs, for example, and his surreal extraterrestrial worlds. Or Wenkai Mao and his futuristic dreamy scenes. Curiously, however, it is a style that is being shaped mainly by the hands of Spanish female artists... Ana Galvañ, for example, moves away from minimalism to explore baroque tables full of aesthetic double senses. While Cristina Daura focuses on a less ethereal and more earthly poetic vision, sometimes even aggressive. In any case, all of them are exploring an unusual path that makes us reconsider the debate of the previous decade on the limits of the relationship between design and art; in the next ten years, we'll likely ask ourselves: where does art end and comics begin? And vice versa.
