Severo Almansa - Memoria del Diseño

Severo Almansa Pascual del Riquelme

Murcia, April 2, 1948
Designer, painter, draftsman and photographer

Severo starts the conversation by saying that “luck does not exist, it is a fallacy”, for him it is an ungrateful expression, unbecoming of someone who has lived long enough to know that circumstances such as the context and the moment are as decisive, or more, as talent…

He considers himself a lucky guy, who happened to live in a time and place where everything had to be designed.

His approach to the field of design, like most professionals of his generation, comes from other disciplines, such as Photography, Architecture, or Drawing. Creators (in a broad sense) who had in common an innate curiosity, a strong sense of aesthetics, artistic skill and, above all, a mastery of spatial conception that, in their case, became their best asset and one of the characteristics of their work.

Of course, there was also an economic interest, because “design, at that time, was valued and paid very well, much better than now”.

Severo’s artistic origins are as a painter, a painting dominated by strokes and drawings, and almost always captured on paper. A drive that he still cultivates with care, and that he has come to convert, in fact, into his livelihood, since the design commissions stopped coming, forcing him to close his studio.

Pepe Cruz Novillo, América Sánchez or Yves Zimmermann, are some of his references in Spain, although the designer who has marked him the most is, without a doubt, the German architect and designer Dieter Rams.

The former Creative Director of the firm BRAUN, went to design, what Mies Van der Rohe -another German-, went to architecture, making “less is more” a revolutionary philosophy that would end up marking, not only the future of industrial design, but of design in general, to the point of becoming the great reference of another designer. Jonathan Ive, who at the helm of Apple, forever changed our relationship with design and technology.

His relationship with América Sánchez, photographer, cartoonist, and one of the most prestigious and influential designers in our country, arises as a result of the work developed by Severo for the pavilion of the Region of Murcia at the Universal Exhibition of Seville (1992), whose architect was Vicente Martínez Gadea, a friend and partner during those first years of prolific activity.

“One day, when I arrived at the pavilion, the stewardesses told me that a very strange man had come, asking for the author of a collection of books that were exhibited there. They were little books about Islam in Murcia and about Pérez Piñero’s structures that I had designed.” Months later, Severo received a letter from the BCD (Barcelona Design Centre), informing him that he was nominated for the National Design Award. “It had been América Sánchez himself who had nominated me.”

He did not win (in fact, that year, the National Design Award went to América Sánchez), but Severo was nominated on several more occasions, until he was nominated permanently. That anecdote generated a bond of friendship and admiration between them that still endures.

Let’s go back to the origin, the first design commissions arose in 1980, as a result of an exhibition that Severo organized together with Vicente Martínez Gadea and Antonio Ballester, in which some of his works were shown. “Those works that were exhibited were almost amusements, graphic and visual experiments in which, almost without knowing it, we were designing.”

At that time, Severo did not recognize himself as a designer, and he still considered himself a painter-draftsman-illustrator. “Design, then, was a pejorative term, which we rejected, because we saw it as a minor discipline compared to the Fine Arts, which is where we came from.”

That exhibition, which they called “The Cartoonist”, was held in the pavilions that the City Council had in the Plaza Santa Isabel, and for the inauguration, they made a poster that had a Venetian-style pencil as the protagonist, on a cobalt blue background. The exhibition was a success, but the poster was even more so.

Fans of books (which Severo and Vicente bought at the Yerba bookstore), among their favorites was the “European Ilustration”, a yearbook that published the best illustration works of the old continent. Severo proposed to Vicente to send the poster of “The Cartoonist”, and two weeks later they received a call from London to tell them that he had been selected. “It was exhibited alongside illustrations by Gerald Scarfe (designer of “The Wall” for Pink Floyd), and some work by the best designers of the moment.”

On the return from that exhibition in London, the commissions began to arrive: Pamesa, Ministry of Culture, General Directorate of Cinema (with Pilar Miró at the helm), Granada Festival, Mérida and Almagro Theatre Festival… projects in which they had full creative freedom and which, in addition, achieved a lot of notoriety, in the 80s when culture was an element of transformation and social cohesion, fundamental in the awakening of a country thirsty for creativity.

The Seville Expo provided him with numerous commissions, but it also meant the end of the partnership with Vicente Martínez Gadea. “The workload that undertook for Vicente to undertake the Murcia pavilion did not allow him to develop more projects”.

Severo is left alone in the studio, a solitude that was interrupted when, in 2000, he met the designer Rosa de la Obra Sendra, with whom he partnered at the Almansa Studio, working and sharing life until its closure in 2011.

In love with poster design, he is saddened that today posters are not made, as he is also saddened by the dizzying pace with which designs are produced, using increasingly advanced technologies to the detriment of a creative process that, in the past, forced the designer to reflect and experiment, demanding a pause, a neatness, and a skill. almost artisanal, which today is almost unthinkable in an era dominated by immediacy and short-termism.

I tell Severo that years ago, when I was starting out in the world of design, and working in the TROPA studio with José Luis Montero, I met him many times at Novograf. It was a time when designers lived in the printing presses (I remember, in fact, taking a night nap next to a Heidelberg reviewing print runs, lulled by the noise of a distant blade machine, and by the smell of ink, which was for us, like the smell of freshly baked bread).

I ask Severo about his greatest strength as a designer, and he answers, without hesitation, “the demand”. He replied that the demand can also become a tyranny, and he acknowledges, without shame, that he has exercised the tyranny of the demand in an excessive way, “with customers, with collaborators, and of course, with myself”.

Severus’s “monsters” were, practically, final arts, which varied very little from the final result. When Severo left, I asked to see them, to analyze and study them. He longed to possess them, to steal them, as if they were incunabula of enormous artistic value.

Severo has no doubt that Design is an artistic discipline in its own right, like Sculpture, like Dance… a discipline that also has many conditioning factors, something that resembles Architecture, which has always aroused great interest in Severo, and which has led him to work on Interior Design and stand design projects.

He pauses, and explains that he arrives in the world of art and, later, in design, abandoning a very different world: Biology. “Very few people know this,” he tells me.

At the age of 12, interested in the scientific world, Severo regularly visited the Faculty of Biology of the University of Murcia, “there, in the laboratory, instructed by a priest called José Andreu, I saw how insects were dissected, and I was fascinated”. Those visits generated in him a fondness for the world of insects “I filled my mother’s bathtub with snakes and had cages where I kept processionary caterpillars”.

Studying the PREU (former Pre-University Course) in the Marists, and encouraged by one of his teachers, Severo entered a competition for school scientific works with a project based on the Thaumetopoea pityocampa (scientific name of the pine processionary), which included numerous field drawings.

The work was awarded in Japan and he was awarded the Humboldt scholarship (a prestigious scientific research grant that includes a stay in Germany) to study plant pathology in Bonn. Severo renounced the scholarship, but the Ministry of Culture offered him, in exchange, to study Agricultural Engineering in Córdoba.

His university journey was very short-lived, “the career was excessively technical, very far from what I expected. I just wanted to be out in the field, studying and drawing insects and plants.”

I ask him if he would have liked to be a biologist, and he replies “absolutely, but… instead of a painter? Surely not.”

Perhaps, from those years, Severo’s interest in drawing flowers and plants, in designing gardens, and ended up being an eminence in the field of magnolia trees.

He recognizes that he has a style, and that his works have a certain personal stamp that could be classified as sober, but that it is in the publishing world, especially in exhibition catalogs, where that stamp of his is most recognizable.

His catalogues for the exhibitions of “Huellas” and “Alfonso X El Sabio”, the publications of the Architecture Awards, or those of the Ramón Gaya Museum, are part of the history of editorial design in our Region.

Revisiting all these projects, other works that are part of his life and professional career come to mind, such as the corporate image of the Chamber of Commerce, or a small book “Homage to Borges” that included an illustration of him, and which was a tribute to the designer Gonzalo Armero, director of “Poetry. Illustrated Magazine of Poetic Information”, which Severo collected.

I ask him how important the cultural work of CajaMurcia was for him as a designer, and for the take-off of graphic design in the Region of Murcia. “The role of CajaMurcia’s social work, like that of the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, has been fundamental in our Region, also with regard to graphic design. In fact, without them, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

The decline of the savings banks, and the subsequent decline of their social works (which are still active, but far from having the weight of yesteryear), not only meant a significant setback for the cultural life of our Region, but also the end of a golden age for graphic design, where the realization of large exhibitions and publications, They provided a fundamental income for professionals and the opportunity to demonstrate their good work.

Severo was never very interested in advertising. His experiences in this field, and his collaboration with various agencies, have always been frustrating for him, although he acknowledges that, as a discipline, “advertising has evolved better than design in recent years, to the point of cannibalizing it.”

He does not hesitate to recognize that, currently, in the Region there are studios and professionals for whom he feels sympathy and admiration, but his assessment of current graphic design, in general terms, is fatalistic, and he relates it to a clear lack of vocation. “Before, people who came to design did so from other disciplines that they already mastered. His foray into design was something natural, and it was accompanied by a self-demand and an artistic culture that today, recent graduates, do not have. For me, being a designer is more of a consequence than a decision.”

With a reputation for vehement, he recognizes that the relationship with customers has never been easy, and when I ask him about how he has handled conflicts with his customers, he replies “Not paying any fucking attention to them. The client is given too much power, and it is we, the professionals, who must make them see that they are not qualified to make certain decisions that concern our work.”

The works of many of the designers of Severo’s generation not only achieved the function for which they were created at the time, but, 40, 50 years later, they are still good designs. The passage of time, consolidation, that is the irrefutable proof of good design.

At this point, the conversation leads us to another of his most memorable projects, one that, in my opinion, is a magnificent example of that ability that some designs have to remain over time, withstanding the vestides of fashions and styles: the corporate image of the Víctor Villegas Auditorium (1995), for which Severo made, also, the entire system of posters and hand programs, giving rise to mythical designs, such as the poster of the concert of the Bergen Philharmonic, which was part of the exhibition “Signs of the Century” at the Reina Sofía National Museum.

Severo’s designs are eternal, totemic, like the image of VINCÓN, by his friend América Sánchez; the logos and posters of his admired Pepe Cruz Novillo; the perfect objects of his teacher Dieter Rams; or the pictograms of the Munich Olympic Games72, created by another of his references, Otl Aicher, promoter of the Ulm School, author of the Rotis typeface (which he used so many times), and the logos of BRAUN, Lufthansa and Bang & Olufsen, the Danish electronics and audio systems brand of which he is recognized as an absolute devotee.

The conversation with Severo gives me a strange feeling. On the one hand, I am glad to have been lucky enough to collect everything that, so generously, Severo had perhaps never told anyone, to capture it so that others, today, tomorrow, and many years from now, will know who he was and what he meant for the history of Design in the Region of Murcia and our country.

On the other hand, it makes me extremely sad that someone so alive, so lucid, so cultured, and so gifted to create beauty, does not have the opportunity to continue leaving his mark in an increasingly mediocre world, and in a discipline that needs, more than ever, experience, talent, coherence and, above all, demand.

………

Interview by Jorge Martínez