Rigo

Guillermo Rigoberto Casola Marcos, born in Havana in 1961, is primarily known by his nickname, Rigo. His parents and siblings, like him, suffered from mental troubles; one of his brothers was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But Rigo has been drawing since he was a child, and when he doesn’t give his drawings away, he throws them away. His watercolors seek to express his everyday life, the experience of a poor Cuban, part artist, part mentally ill, and who isn’t devoid of humor. Halfway between pop art and illustration, these sketches progress in their narration like a horizontal storyboard made of little assembled pieces of recycled paper. His confident graphic language owes much to his talent as a colorist.

Moreover, Rigo also likes to watch experimental films and he goes as far as filming his own videos, which he keeps until the moment he finds a computer from which to stream them. In his very short films, he often lingers on the details of his own drawings, giving them a poetic strangeness that the surrealists would not have rejected.

Even though he has been committed to psychiatric institutions twice, Rigoberto now works as a guard for the government.