Luis Royo was born in 1954 in Olalla, a small village in Teruel, Spain.  As a child, he moved to Zaragoza where he studied technical design, painting, and interior design. By 1972 he began painting, exposing his art to new forum. In 1978 he became a comic artist and soon triumphed internationally. Samples of his work appeared in some of the most important magazines of the time and were later compiled into the following books: Luis Royo (Rambla, 1985) and Desfase (Ikusager, 1986). In 1983 he moved onto illustrations, were he produced his greatest achievements.  He achieves this success with the help of Norma, his publisher and editor that distributes his work to the entire world.  In 1992 his first book, Women, appears, followed by Malefic (1994), Secrets (1996), III Millennium (1998), Dreams (1999), Prohibited Book 1 (1999), Evolution (2001), Prohibited Book 2 (2001, Conceptions I (2002), Visions (2003), Prohibited Book 3 (2003) and Conceptions II (2003).  Along with these titles, six collectors cards series were released, five collectors portfolios, posters, and a tarot card set called The Black Tarot. The increasing popularity of Royo´s  images allowed for the publication of postcards, calendars, playing cards, t-shirts, album covers, video games, mouse pads, and even sculpture.

With such a wide range of products, Royo has become an authentic cultural phenomenon.  His books have gone through numerous editions and have been translated into French, English, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese.  Magazines like Stampa, Airbrush-Action, and Penthouse have dedicated entire articles to him.  Festivals, art galleries, and specialty stores continuously organize expositions honoring his work.  He has received the Spectrum Silver Award (United States), Cartoomics (Italy), and the Pilgrim Prize (Russia), amongst many others.

The success of Royo is due largely to the originality of his work, which has broken through traditional barriers and revolutionized the world of illustration.  He has a keen interest in fantasy themes, though he experiments with other themes like the western, historic epics, and romance.  Setting aside his themes, his innovative style breathes power while radiating a fragile, almost mystic transparency.  Royo´s  treatment of the human figure, especially his women, endows the body with a soulful brilliance.  His use of color, from the most saturated gamma to the most despoiled gray is contrasted with an intense touch of chrome, creating an aura of fascination that invites us to enter his world.

Despite the consistent use of certain elements, Royo´s  style reflects a clear evolution. When reviewing his work chronologically, one can see a refinement in his style and the reinforcement of his theme, as each composition becomes even more poetic and graceful.  The apparent simplicity of his drawings is deceptive, allowing for a complex plot and a range of artistic options.  His permanence on the front lines in the world of illustration and his increasing success is the result of his constant, subtle, and effective experimentation.

Royo has made the myth of  “beauty and the beast” his principal theme, effortlessly moving from horror to the lyrical.  Whatever the theme, his characters waltz effortlessly between epic and erotic.  The subject´s  flesh is overlaid with a defiant and threatening tone, marking them more exciting.  As Royo knows all too well, when the dark ghost of death looms over the hero, the suggestion of sex becomes more intense.
When studying his characters, one notices that he places the subject on the border of tragedy, where they can shine more brilliantly.  Their frozen position anticipates a destiny as attractive as it is cruel. Clutching their weapon, they await the next attack.  Their intensity and the tautness of their muscles make them even more beautiful and dramatic.  In the blink of an eye they can disappear, having been devoured by the danger that encircles them.  But the immediate future doesn´t  interest  Royo.  He portrays that penultimate moment, when the inner soul of the hero is revealed.

Antonio Altarriba (writer, screenwriter, professor and theoretician of the image)

 With Rafa Martinez in Russia, after having received The Pilgrim Fantasy Award.

Con Julie Strain signing at Comicon, San Diego; and the conference at Comicon, San Diego

Some covers of magazines in the 80s

Exhibition in the 70s

 

A retrospective look  at my work is a good place to try and explain the why and how behind my images. If someone has taken on the challenge of depicting dreams and fantasies, they should be able to shed some light on the subject. It´s difficult to distance oneself and like a pinned insect, observe ourselves objectively, but we can give it a shot. Perhaps a story is the best way to uncover key glimpses into the self and find the very source of one´s inspiration.


THE BOY IN THE WINDOW
Elt was a gray and gloomy country with long winters, sad faces, empty stomachs and weather-beaten coats, all the disheartening signs of a post war period. A small boy and his family were living on the ground floor of an old house in the heart of the city. It was hot and humid, with just one window that overlooked a small courtyard. A place which now, as an adult, he can barely recall a single image of. On his seventh birthday, his family moved to a new neighborhood. Their apartment was the custodian´s quarters on the eight floor of the building. It was a tiny place, barely more than 300 cubic feet, but there was one hidden gem, a window with a panoramic view of the entire city. At that moment, his eyes were lost in the horizon and he became conscious of his own existence.

It was a wonderful day, but the night punished him with memories that struck him like arrows, of the windows that overlooked the schoolyard he left behind. There was a teacher who didn´t like teaching the day´s lesson, and would give each student, a blank piece of paper and a drawing for them to trace. For the boy in the window she was a goddess. He spent hour after hour with his friends, their faces pressed against the glass tracing out images. Never had he felt so happy. Each time his fingers moved across the blank page, he watched his pencil give birth to figure after figure. He remembered that every morning before he went to school his mother would give him candy to stop him from crying, which he would then secretly give to his teacher. If he could, he would give the whole world to the goddess who could make him happy.

Years passed with his eyes transfixed on the urban horizon. His eyes fluttered over thousands of darkened city windows, inspiring him to create people and imaginary worlds for each point of darkness. Soon came adolescence when all the teenagers would get together on Saturday nights, listening to music until their heads exploded. On one of those nights, as the old nightclub began to empty, he sat in the corner, his eyes bloodshot from alcohol. The walls and multicolored lights of the dance floor framed a new window that awakened his dormant desires. In the center of that window was a girl, no more than sixteen, dancing to the rhythm of the music. With each movement her very short dress revealed a trace of her white panties. Once again, his world was crushed by the opening of a new window, framed by a dazzling array of psychedelic lights. After many months of persistence, there came the glorious day when he finally won over the girl with the white panties. Together they moved in and out of tiny windowless lofts, but through it all there remained the constant desire to fill blank paper and canvas with hundreds of drawings and paintings. In time a little baby came and they had to move into a small apartment on the outskirts of the city. The window in the new apartment brought back the gray, bleak world of his youth. The horizon was cluttered with the silhouettes of factories and plumes of smoke rising from chimneys. In his new home, he placed a large canvas and drew guidelines on the glass, just like when he was a child, tracing and painting the sad city in gray. The two of them spent many years in the room with three windows: that of the real which overlooked the smoke stacks and the factories, that of fantasy which he found on a blank page, and that which appeared on the dark surface of the chalkboard, where the powerful imagination of a young boy could emerge.

The drawings and paintings began to fill all the drawers and the piles of canvas grew so tall, there was less and less space left in that apartment. One day, those drawings and paintings began to bring money to the family and allowed them to move to a new place. It was close to the beach and allowed him to see the sky kiss the sea, but his eyes lost their ability to comprehend the vast distance. He had grown too accustomed to living trapped amidst blank canvas and paper, obsessed with turning the emptiness around him into thousands of images that were later published in different places. The window was the blank paper, the gateway that could transport him to imaginary universes and allowed him to live in one fantasy after another.

He suddenly felt suffocated, but didn´t know why. He returned to his city, with the ludicrous desire to find an apartment in a tall building where he could rediscover the horizon of his childhood and rekindle his eyes. That new window filled him with peace, if only for a moment. The years dragged at the foot of the new window, but it didn´t  restore his childhood dreams, so he continued to turn blank paper into window. The paper dreams continued to succeed and he spent more time lost in those dreams than outside of them. The true horizon became more and more blurry. 

 

One morning he peered into a window that had never told him anything special before, the bathroom mirror. There, he discovered an aging man with gray hair and dark circles under his eyes. He packed his bags and moved to a warm, quiet beach where a distant sea awaited him. While he sat there, sketching on paper, his inseparable companion, he perceived the immensity of the horizon. It was the same horizon he discovered on his seventh birthday, which he lost so many years ago. He suddenly realized he was standing in front of a massive window of light that was hidden in a remote corner. For the first time, he saw the sky and sea with eyes unclouded. Even though he had looked at it hundreds of time before and from many different angles, he had never truly seen it. He was overwhelmed by the immensity of that window and put away his small windows of paper, and for a few moments, lost himself in the intoxicating horizon.  He knew that from that moment on, he would always have doubts as to which window to look out of.

After this short story, which deals with the intimate life of an illustrator, we are left to confront the more difficult problem of explaining the use fullness, the intention, the evaluation, and the sentiment behind what we call illustration. In previous books l´ve mentioned my preference for calling it by its old name, “illumination” as opposed to “illustration”. For this reason I used windows as metaphors to help you better understand the distinction. I´ve read hundreds of opinions about the meaning of art, I´ve listened to hundreds of artists discuss it, I´ve seen hundreds and hundreds of words describing the topic, from the coldest and most calculating to the most passionate.  It´s  truly an overwhelming subject.

What could one say regarding this topic that would make sense? I can only speak about a small paper window that calls out to me and says, “What would you like me to show you?  Open me up with your pencils and paints and tell me what you see”. The truth is, it never shows me what I really want to see, or perhaps its does in a mischievous way, enticing me to open yet another window. What do theories matter or what they call art?  All I know is that a blank window awaits me every morning on my drawing desk.  If the boy in the window didn´t   find  it there every day, his tears would blind him.  I also wanted to mention that it´s gratifying to see thousands   of men and women that have also dedicated their time to converting a blank page into something more.  What a passionate quest!  The possibilities are infinite from the dispassionate “Painting 135”, to the emotional “Child Eating Watermelon”, or the most provocative “Electric Chair”.  Art is not the type of subject where you can edit someone´s work by adding commas and periods, nor impartially discuss contrasts or similarities.  There are only thousands of windows, and some which are quite magnificent.

Luis Royo