The God of Money is an impressive sight, a pig endowed with horns and fangs wearing the crisp pinstriped suit of a the Wall Street banker. Like a typical calendar-art-style meditating divinity, he sits erect and cross legged holding a coin in one hand and a skull on which a crow is perched in the other. More coins emanate from his slit head, “it represents a piggy bank”, says his creator, Marcos Guardiola Martin who prefers to go by Maguma, a portmanteau of his name.
God of Money is the third book of the Spanish artist, who is on a book tour in India. “The project started because I met Gita (Wolf of Tara Books) in a fair; at that time I was working for newspapers and magazines and most of my work was related to political topics. She liked what I did and told me she wanted to do something around a political topic,” says the Madrid-based Maguma.
They zeroed in on Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written between April and August that year, a collection of some of his earliest writings that analysed modern industrial societies and found them wanting. “There were a lot of ideas that people know about Marx and Marxism, but the way that this text was written was not so much about philosophy but about feelings,” he says, adding that the words were especially poignant because they were written, “straight from the heart and are connected so much in the present even though it was written a long time ago”.
Shades of blue dominate the accordion-shaped book that draws an interesting parallel between Karl Marx’s text and the Fall of Man, “When Adam discovers private property, he transforms himself into something evil,” says he artist, pointing out the book progressively gets darker as Adam gets more corrupted by capitalist economics (of the sort proposed by another Adam (Smith), go figure).
The original manuscript, dealt with a number of topics, so he concentrated on the parts that spoke about economics and tried to find a parallel idea to help him tell this story.
“I chose the tale of Adam and Eve since it is easy for most of us to relate to and understand,” he explains.
From architecture to art
“I have been drawing since the age of one and it has always come very easily to me,” says Maguma, whose intense, bright and markedly surrealistic style manages to make outrageously bizarre look almost beautiful. Inspired by people like Italian comic book writer and artist Milo Manara and French and the legendary French cartoonist, Jean Giraud (Moebius), he describes his work as, “ever evolving” and says that he focusses on not just the visual but the conceptual, “My imagination is not for decorating but for telling something,” he says.
Trained as an architect, he went on to work at El Pais , the second most read newspaper in Spanish. Here, he began doing illustrations for articles mostly related to politics. “I am very interested in politics so it worked very well,” says Maguma, who has worked with a number of international publications including Forbes, Reader’s Digest, El Español, Yorokobu and Inside Housing . “ People think architecture is something that is far away from this, but it teaches you how to design and think in complex problems. That helps a lot,” he says.
While he does do a lot of work digitally, his sketchbook accompanies him everywhere.
“When I go out and take a walk, I like to draw what I see. And all these drawings are somehow distilled into the project,” he says. Which explains the crow that makes its appearance many times in God of Money . “I was attacked by a crow when I first came to Chennai,” he says, wryly.
He is currently working on a new project with Tara Books, “a fairy tale. But there is some relationship with God of Money ,” he smiles.
