Gabriel Pacheco: Illustrator – Mexico

Illustration comes together in a space of silence, like an ink blot that finds form. It’s true, the shape that we see appearing in the stone roof, the crinkles of the paper, the stain left by the ink, the trail of a brush on paper, or the shape of the clouds...we have already seen it within ourselves, but we have just forgotten it over time, and picture books give that back to us.

G. Pacheco

whatever abstract moments we might remember from our dreams or from fairytales, Gabriel Pacheco recalls them back in his surreal scenes and compositions: A woman bound to a horse with a feather on her head, surrounded by a cascade of umbrellas. A solitary stag wounded by an arrow looking back to us from the doorway of a room indoors. A ghostly ship squeezing its way through a quiet city. Using a restrained palate of grey shades, accented by azure blue and poppy red, Pacheco softly transports readers to spaces that are both magical and uncanny, visions that give symbolic form to the words of writers he chooses to collaborate with. In this sense, he is a literary illustrator. Born in Mexico City in 1973, Pacheco began his creative journey as a set designer, studying scenography at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. He also took classes in illustration and life drawing at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, later completing a Diploma in Children’s Literature in Barcelona. However, he attests that the focus towards illustrating books came by chance following a request by his sister to illustrate a book called The Enchanted Frog (1997). This experience created an opening for his thinking and practice, building a desire for storytelling through images that has been with him ever since. Even so, he maintains that, holistically, it is the writings of Octavio Paz, the vision of filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and the dramaturgy of choreographer Pina Bauch that taught him how to look.

Pacheco’s work travels between different realities reflecting his philosophical approach to making visual poetry. He conceives of the fragment (of time, space, memory) as a window onto story but also a means of articulating what is forever lost. It is, for example, the fragments of old book pages embedded in the trees and plants of his illustrations for The Jungle Book (2012) which remind the reader that the book they are holding is a long gone story that has already been told. Similarly, the illustrations for 12 Illustrated Poems by Lorca (2013) are composed like the poet’s fragments of verse: How does Pacheco depict a child who insists he wants to be silver and water? By giving him his own special rain cloud that drenches him thoroughly, with a silver lining draped around his wrist.