The Drawings of Guillermo del Toro
By: Sol Astrid Giraldo E.
Photos: Courtesy: Minneapolis Institute of Art
In the real world, the origins of every person we meet in a park or on a plane can be taken for granted: regardless of their size or color, they were obviously born of parents. But how do we account for the origins of monsters, singular creatures who can be seen as glitches in the system or affronts to the natural order? Guillermo del Toro, ambassador plenipotentiary to Monsterland, has used his pen to pull them from the labyrinths of his mind, sketching a place for monsters amongst us.
In his films, the Faun, the red and green spirits, Gas-man, Rubber Man, the various Kaiju, Amphibian Man, and the rest of his court of misfits inhabit the streets of Mexico City, the sewers of New York, and the crumbling estates of Franco’s Spain. These are strong, hallucinatory, in-your-face monsters, which is why peering into their inner workings and their silent births is such a striking experience.
Installation views of the exhibition “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters”; 5 March – 28 May 2017; Target Gallery; Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Art Gallery of Ontario
We owe this opportunity to the fact that this creator of chaos is paradoxically methodical, to the point of obsession. Since the beginning of his career in the 80s, del Toro has always carried around notebooks in which he records his crazy ideas, making meticulous notes. A swipe of ink brings his ideas to life in his notebooks, as do the occasional string of words, but he generally sketches out his monsters, since he tends to think in images.
Looking at these sketches tosses us into the sea of his visual ideas and we get a sense of how his works originate, emerge, fade, and change in a continuous state of flux. For example, we witness the birth of Pale Man, the monster from Pan’s Labyrinth. The first drafts of the monster show a mass of sagging skin with eyes in his face. However, on the next page, the eyes have been set into the palms of the creature’s hands, giving us the now-famous image. In another drawing, we see how the horns of the old vision of a goat grow big enough for del Toro’s modern Faun.
Del Toro lets his pencil go wild on these pages: he soars, asks questions, gets excited, speculates, investigates, and blots his work, but never erases.
Third Thursday: At Home With Monsters; Thursday 16 March 2017; Join My Mia and see “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters” FREE; music by Graveyard Club; special fx makeup demo by Darla Edin; make and take your own monster with artists from Monster World HQ; connect with Source Comics and Games, MSPIFF, and others; MAEP opening; del Toro superfan gallery talks; museum-wide
He talks to himself, to his objects, to history, to science, and to his utopias. His notebooks are ultimately practical: a film production team will make, for example, a 3-D Cathedral Head, faithfully and precisely reproducing the colors to preserve the melancholy of the original drawing. Each one of these notebooks eventually ends up as an independent art project.
Some critics have compared them to Leonardo da Vinci’s Codices, but where da Vinci hoped to discover and use the hidden natural laws of anatomy, Del Toro attempts to dismantle them. The notebooks show a man in search of his own laws, allowing us to understand that his monsters have structure, his dimensional aberrations architecture, and his chaos borders and confines. These strategies allow him to honor his most important precept: progressing from “the straight lines of the real world to the roundedness of fantasy.”
These notebooks —already cult objects— form part of the acclaimed exhibit “At Home with Monsters.” After sojourning in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Ontario, the exhibit finally comes to the Guadalajara Art Museum in March. Visitors can inspect more than five hundred drawings, paintings, models, statues, photos, storyboards, and costumes from del Toro’s productions. The exhibit is also a monster in terms of the questions it asks of a traditional museum about the relationship between high and low culture on the contemporary art scene.
Creative Conversation: Guillermo del Toro; event held for the exhibition “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters”; 5 March 2017; talk with Mia Director Kaywin Feldman, Guillermo del Toro, and curator Gabriel Ritter; book signing; tour of exhibition led by del Toro; Pillsbury Auditorium; Fountain Court; Target Gallery; exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Art Gallery of Ontario
