Pablo Bernasconi: Illustrator–Argentina

Pablo Bernasconi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 6, 1973. He is a graphic designer graduated from Buenos Aires University, where he was professor of Design for five years. He began his career as an illustrator at the newspaper Clarín in 1998, preparing covers for more than three hundred and fifty supplement editions. His illustrations have been published in newspapers and magazines all around the world, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Telegraph, and The Times. Besides his work with publishers and media, Bernasconi is permanently collaborating with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo) on their graphic work.

Bernasconi is the author for the text and illustrations of sixteen books, and he has collaborated on another twenty with his illustrations. Moreover, he has participated in several individual and group exhibitions in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Italy, Slovenia, Colombia, the United States, and United Kingdom. His most important books are Lies and Brushes, The Wizard, the Ugly and the Book of Shame, The Real Explanation, The Diary of Captain Arsenio, and Excesses and Exaggerations, among many others. He has been awarded numerous prizes and awards: he was selected for "Illustration Now" TASCHEN 2014, received the Gold Medal in the Society of Paper Design (SND) 2012 and the Banco del Libro of Venezuela for The Dairy of Captain Arsenio, selected in the Secretary of Public Education of Mexico (SEP), and selected to represent Argentina at the Bologna International Children's Book Fair.

The specialist Norberto Chaves stated about Bernasconi,

Pablo Bernasconi creates a nonlinear world, with its image score, composed as an incomplete message, with snippets of speech full of winks and implications. The reader, his accomplice, completes and reorganizes the photograph with what is not there, with that which the illustrator has hidden neatly.

Bernasconi says about his relationship with child readers, "my intention is always tangential, to take another way. In this sense, rhetoric and metaphor work well, they are kind enough to be a helping hand without pulling apart." In his public speeches, Pablo delights children and adults: "Poetry (visual or written) makes us feel closer to the human aspect of things: it is inherent to the brightness of truth." And about the technique, he emphasizes, "I use a lot of collage, because it is the most efficient way of transferring what I think. The metaphor that the collage represents is more direct and less noisy."