The incredible world of Antonio Lorente, the Spanish illustrator

The incredible world of Antonio Lorente, the Spanish illustrator who revives the classics between fantasy and impact

Visiting Buenos Aires, the artist reviews his working method, his beginnings and his relationship with technology. What he thinks about artificial intelligence and the illustration boom.

Antonio Lorente was born in Almería, in 1987, and his work stands out for a realism impregnated with features of pop art.
The story was written in 1820, but it returns now with gray and mysterious eyes that stand out on the cover, in the advertising billboards, on the heights of one of the most imposing stands at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. The most recent edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Edelvives, 2024) recovers the classic creation of the American writer Washington Irving and does so with a unique seasoning: the magnetic drawings of the Spanish illustrator Antonio Lorente.
With a special ability to capture glances and find a very particular style in excess, the cartoonist accompanies with his work the story of Ichabod Crane, a humble teacher who is assigned to the mysterious town of Sleepy Hollow. Between fantasy, terror and more than one chilling scene, the man dreams of conquering Katrina van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy local man.
With pop surrealism and the so-called lowbrow art born in the '80s in California as unavoidable references, the Spanish artist seems to find a new life in different classic stories and in his characters, with penetrating gestures and angular faces. Among others, he illustrated new versions of Peter Pan, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little Women. But without a doubt the great global impact of his work came with the illustrations he made for the editions of Ana de Tejas Verdes, the remembered story of an orphan girl full of imagination.

Closer to the fantasy and horror genre, Lorente now encouraged himself with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to show, in some way, that he was capable of working with luminous stories and also moving in a darker register.

“I needed to show some darkness, the yin and yang, the gloomy, the bad. In the end you also think about it and it is a darkness with a lot of light in this story. Because there is also beauty,” the illustrator, who was passing through Argentina to participate in the Book Fair, different meetings with the public that received him with fervor, and a talk that took place at the Museum of Latin American Art, reflects to elDiarioAR. from Buenos Aires (Malba).

This is the cover of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", by Washington Irving, with illustrations by Antonio Lorente. Courtesy of Editorial Edelvives

– As a child, what was your connection with books? Were you especially interested in the classics?

– There have always been books in my house. It was a house with books. And we have always read a lot and they have also told us stories, so I have had a certain bond. But not everything was classic. Later, some of them I knew at school and others I read from scratch when I was older. For example, Tom Sawyer. I knew the history, the filmography, the iconography, I knew a little, but I found it over time. That has happened to me with the classics: I have encountered many of them again and I have read them again and seen them with a different vision, because also depending on when you read a book it will reach you in one way or another.

– You have worked with several classics so far in your career, are you interested in thinking beyond those stories?

- Yes Yes Yes. And in fact I have been signed with different projects for several years now. Even about many things, because I don't like to pigeonhole myself as the author of the classics. I think it's also good to show different things. Even own projects, why not. Or projects with authors who are alive who always have something that the dead don't have (laughs).

– You can always chat with them. With classics you can't know if they like it or if they have complaints about what you did.

–Of course, if they like it or not I will never know, right? (laughs). But I always do it with the utmost respect. I try to be very faithful to the text and vary as little as possible.

– When you start working on these classics or on stories that are well known, what audience do you think about? How do you approach your work that later turns out to be so surprising?

Read More