Mario Eskenazi: "To Colau I say Colei because she is like Milei, but of the left"

BarcelonaOn WhatsApp he has a portrait of his friend Javi Royo, who is the maximum purification he himself aspires to as a designer: a circle and a cigar. And yes, Mario Eskenazi's bald and shiny head – in every sense – is usually accentuated by a cigarette he's puffing on in his Gothic Quarter studio while reviewing – Banc Sabadell, TMB, Mossos d’Esquadra... – some of his omnipresent projects.

80 years old. But we're not meeting at the pétanque court, but at the studio where he comes every day.

— It's just that the only thing I like is working. Facing a problem that needs a graphical solution and going through the whole process to solve it is like an orgasm.

He has worked a lot on designs for Barcelona. Where does this passion come from?

— I arrived in Barcelona in 1974 and worked for a while with a very good designer who was also from Argentina and was here, and his name was Carlos Rolando. I devoured the American magazines I received and thought: how good they are, those Yankees! But he told me: what you see in the magazine you only find in very special stores. On the street, New York is as ugly as here.

Was it an epiphany?

— I was 26 years old and it became my obsession: why can't there be good design on the street? And over time, I got commissions: BCNeta, TMB, the Tragaluz group, Banc Sabadell, Barça... I would go out for a walk and I liked to know that good design could be on the street.

Barcelona, in the 80s, was considered the Mecca of design. Is it still a beautiful city, in this sense?

— Barcelona is the best city. But in design... very regular. Still the best in Spain, though.

What happened for it to be like this?

— Populism. The networks. Before, you had to study a lot. The internet has democratized knowledge, but in Spain there is very little culture. Fix it a bit for me, because I'm sorry, but it's just that since Charles V, except for some specific moment of improvement, education has not been good like in the north. And my progressive spirit comes out: the right wing screws up. Rajoy, Aznar... it has all been a setback.

Are there no good designers left?

— I'm not saying there aren't some good designers here, but massively, a lot of work is done for social media, and what you see is the same as anywhere else. The big studios do very commercial work, following the trend and what Instagram dictates.

He arrived here fleeing a military dictatorship.

— Yes, I was lucky with my education. Mind you, I am not a nationalist of anywhere. A citizen of the world. Or as my mother used to say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. At home, education was atheism. My father was Turkish and poor, but since education was free and compulsory, he obtained two degrees, one of which was architecture. My mother was a teacher of mathematics and physics. My parents were of Jewish origin and we lived in a small city. To Catholics we were Jews – and in Argentina, after "Jew" always comes "of shit" – and to Jews we were renegades, which is the worst there is.

Perhaps his view of present-day Barcelona is influenced by nostalgia for when he was young.

— It was certainly a party. Once, when you could still walk along Las Ramblas, I met a group of students who had been my students in the Canary Islands. And chatting with them, they told me: “Mario, when you came to give us class... you arrived very high!” And yes, I spent the night partying, at festivals, without sleeping... But I'm not particularly sociable. Ligoncete, yes, I had a few girlfriends.

I would like to review logos that have been created. Banca Catalana, for example.

— Bank made me think of a percentage symbol. If I combined it with the idea of the four bars for Catalonia, the result was those four unequal, symmetrical, and inclined orange bars, which could make one think of it. Orange, of course, because we were still under Francoism and they would not have allowed us to put the red bars on a yellow background in any way.

Here are two miniature Mossos cars in the studio, with the line of small squares that identify them, which are also theirs.

— The police costumes were made by Toni Miró. Well, the uniforms, but I can't stand the police because I'm an anarchist. I understand they have to exist, but it doesn't excite me. In any case, the idea was to make them a bit friendly, with some squares that could again recall the Catalan flag and simple letters, so they would be easy to read and not a very tortured typeface.

Banc Sabadell. Another bank, ahem!

— By chance, again! I knew Pep Oliu through his wife, because she had worked at the Summa studio, like me. The entity wanted to start expanding into southern Spain and planned to use the SolBank brand, the Sun Bank. I told them: why don't we keep the Sabadell name? But they told me that the surveys advised against it. That they had a lot of respect for Catalans and admitted that they worked very well... but that they were not loved in the south.

What logo did you propose?

— A red circle, for the Sun, and the B of Bank. But when I was presenting it to the competition jury, they told me: “We could use it for the Sabadell Group”. And I told them yes, that all that was needed was to give it their blue color. And so it remained.

AND ALSO?

— Oh, that makes me angry. I am a political anarchist and I hate extremism. Things happen when you grow up under Perón and his fascination with Mussolini. I hate populism and, secondly, nationalism. I was working on TMB's identity for twelve years and I enjoyed it very much. Until 2015...

The year of Colau.

— I call him Colei, because he is like Milei, but from the left. And I call him that because my daughters don't let me say what I feel like saying to him. I know they are different, but populism, both left-wing and right-wing, is ignorance in power. And Colei appointed an environmentalist cyclist to direct TMB. Everything that was beginning to be applied was interrupted.

It talks about typography as a template, with the lines crossing the letters vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

— Exactly, they are the Barcelona grid and they recall the markings painted on the ground. In Seoul they liked it so much that they wanted it for their buses. Politicians are all about self-interest. PP, Convergence, Comuns or Socialist... they all sweep towards home. And I learned it now, at 80 years old. Of the new mayor, I don't even have an opinion. What can you do? That's what I like about private companies: that at least they take care of it.

Is she considered an artist?

— Clearly, no. I admire artists and I envy them. My best friend is Mariscal and wherever he goes he carries his notebook and draws: he doesn't need any commission. I freak out. What I do has to be in the street, otherwise, it's no use to me.