Canonical heterodoxy
It is not in the sunny and colourful evocations of Barcelona-where our subject comes from-that these lines start, but in the cold mountains of Navarra, for it is in Pamplona, the capital city of the aforementioned region, where the consecration of the talent of our artist happened. Because it was there, in the cold days of March where the Malofiej awards took place. Now on stand-by(we hope) until new notice, these awards were a place for the recognition of talent in the context of visual journalism and its many guises. It was there where the work of Jaime Serra found its righteous place. The awards themselves were named after Alejandro Malofiej (1938-1987) , an Argentinian cartographer renowned for his acumen in visual journalism in a time where ink pens, rules and letter sets were the tools at hand. Every year, journalism students and practitioners from around the world arrived at the small airport of the city in the early and cold mornings of March to the concrete buildings of the university to hear the most renowned professionals of the field explaining their latest experiences and showing their awarded works. There were many names I could write here, however, this time I will only focus on someone whose work was, for a newbie like me, just discovering what?infografia?(infographic) meant, difficult to grasp and therefore was a linchpin for curiosity and admiration. His direction in Clarín and La Vanguardia set a north fro many, myself included.
This is about Jaime Serra. The work of Jaime Serra is at the same time canonical and heterodox. These qualities made him the flagship of infographics for a whole generation. Couldn't be otherwise, as the author of the most important graphic in the 20 years of the Malofiej award. His works stay at the edge of the art and design- if such edge exist-and the work of Jaime put it in doubt, such in the poetic air that can be appreciated in his graphic works.
If anything, his art pieces are what is more properly called data art, sometimes moving to a journalistic approach. In that sense, Jaime Serra endorses himself to a contemporary preoccupation from the world of visual arts. His work questions the nature of data in our prosaic world. Like his work about the sexual life of a stable couple.?
But the real reason why he is still relevant, in my certainly biased opinion, is because he always seats at the edges of reflection and information, like an incongruous being that stays nervously on the edge of things, not belonging to the taxonomies defined by the agrimensors of the visual taxonomies and resisting incoherently to admirers and critics alike.
Why should he? A case in point is the famous "ballena franca"(Eubalaena australis, a Southern right whale), a graphic that is as much an illustration as an informative piece. A school of designers and illustrators, whose eyes were opened by this piece, was created in the years after. And yet, as his character demanded, Serra pursued other paths, always double-guessing the expectations of the ones that follow his work. And if you follow his works as I do, you will see that his endeavors into data art are tinted by the incongruous, yet tender and vulnerable.
Notes