Praise for Krahn's world

The reward for the best illustrators is often invisibility. Accustomed to seeing Sempé in Paris-Match in the 1970s, Perich in TeleXpress , Forges in El País , or Plantu in Le Monde , we need them and ignore them like our morning coffee with milk, something routine until we miss it. So much a part of our lives, so obvious... forgetting that all of Cioran's anguish is trivial compared to the everyday tragicomedy of Sempé's français moyen , or that Forges created the lexicon of transition, just as Cesc created the image of the long-suffering Spaniard. Without them, our imagination would be poorer.

For many years, Fernando Krahn was the icing on the cake of our Sunday newspaper pleasure: he sweetened (and often soured) the frivolities of La Vanguardia 's Magazine , signing off from the back page with his stories of hirsute, perplexed, determined, grandiloquent, taciturn, mysterious, enthusiastic, dejected characters, so close yet so remote. And that Algarive quality is what saved him from invisibility: it's impossible to know in which country his fables take place, or from which galaxy his intensely gazing inhabitants come. Sempé's Frenchmen are French, just as Forges's bearded men are progressive (from when "progressive" wasn't a derogatory term), and Cesc's beret-wearing gentlemen, well, that's it. But Krahn's...

From his pencil emerged a fascinating fauna of fatuous, sinister and voracious predators.

Krahn came from afar: he arrived in Spain from Chile with his family in 1973, to spend a few months on a scholarship. For reasons that are retrospectively obvious, his stay became permanent, and his talent joined that of so many other Argentine and Chilean exiles who shook up our proverbial provincialism. Grateful, he baptized them all with the generic term "sudacas" (South Americans). But talent sometimes triumphs, and Krahn, with his culture, his attitude, and that accessibility that emigration imposes, soon became friends with colleagues and writers, fascinated by a collection of disturbing images with which the artist attempted to digest the tragedy of his country, which we all perceived as the tragedy of the entire world: for us (sorry) progressives, Allende's assassination was the assassination of freedom five years after the Prague Spring. What a mess.

Among the many who felt bewitched by that fauna of parasites, sinister, voracious and fatuous predators coming from Krahn's pencil, Joan Brossa baptized him a visual poet and gave names and surnames to each of the disturbing images that Editorial Destino gathered in El fuet de cent cues in 1988.

A selection of these images can now be seen at the El Piset gallery at 16 Carrer Xuclà, just a stone's throw from La Rambla, and I highly recommend a visit. El Piset is just that, a piset , and in this welcoming and refined space, the affection and knowledge of Matias Krahn (Fernando's son), Isabel Rabassa, and Maria Cuéllar have created one of those art spaces that enrich the exhibition landscape in Barcelona.

This is a very different Krahn from our Krahn, the one from the Magazine : these characters are archetypes of evil, as were those of the great Weimar Expressionist draftsmen, and Brossa's texts make them more disturbing, but even with all the bitterness the artist must have felt at those moments, he is not capable of deep hatred: there is always a veil of irony in his gaze, as if recognizing that these monsters are not another species. Just as at the bottom of the bonhomie and indulgence with which he looks at his endearing Sunday characters there beats a strangeness, a disquiet about what the most anodyne and normal of us is capable of doing.

Great, Krahn! Don't miss it.