The Barcelona-based artist on tattoo flash, tribal magic and why his strangest characters start in real life.
Spend a minute with a Ricardo Cavolo painting and it starts looking back, several times over. Eyes run along the top of his murals like a border. They sit inside the sun, peer out of a goblet and stack three deep down a single cheek. Around them come flames, roses, snakes and stars, the vocabulary of a painter who treats every figure as a story waiting to be read.
The characters look like pure invention. Cavolo says they aren’t. “Everything is based in our reality,” he says. “Even fantasy is based on our lives and it’s simply taken to another dimension.”
He works from what he sees. “I like to pay attention to people and things in my daily life so that I can use them for my work,” he says. “Even if what I’m creating isn’t based in reality. Most of the time, I use my own fantasy to talk about reality.”
Cavolo was born in Salamanca in 1982 and grew up the child of an art teacher, surrounded by brushes and canvases. He credits his father with seeing the talent early and backing it. “It’s been a very fluid path,” he says. “Since I was able to handle markers, I haven’t stopped drawing. It’s been a part of my inner universe to this day.”
Fluid isn’t the same as fast. “It’s been a long, long way,” he says. He studied fine art at the University of Salamanca, but the lessons that mattered happened in his own studio, copying the artists and styles he loved, for fun and with no goal in mind. “I want to be able to recreate the styles that I’ve always loved and admired,” he says. His own style came out of all that imitation, “in an unconscious way, just being guided by my guts.”
For years he worked as an art director at magazines and agencies, and he never made a formal decision to go full-time. “I never really decided to become a professional, I’m just developing the only action I know,” he says. “I guess I’m just lucky that it became my job.”
People and their stories come first. Beyond that his references run wide, from European religious and folk imagery to the edges of subculture, and he singles out two. “Old-school tattoo culture is very interesting in terms of using symbology in a simple and direct way,” he says. “Tribal art is another one, in terms of mixing visual arts and magic in a very simple way.”
Music is the other constant. In 2016 he published 101 Artists to Listen to Before You Die, an illustrated tour of the musicians who get the most play in his studio, from Johnny Cash and Hank Williams to Amy Winehouse, Kanye West and Daft Punk. That same year he designed the cover of 99.9%, the debut album from Kaytranada, after getting to know the producer on his trips to Montreal.
The work now runs from large murals to solo exhibitions abroad, with commissions for Nike, Alexander McQueen and Bally along the way. He still works the way he always has, alone and inward.
“I’m just focused on expressing what I have on the inside,” he says. “I’m great at just isolating myself, wherever I am, and just getting lost in my own universe.”
Words by Braeden Alexander. Images courtesy of Ricardo Cavolo.
