The artist is very hard to catch, but thanks to him being one of the most famous comic artists out there, there are lots of little nuggets of knowledge about him that can be found all across the internet. Turns out the Spanish-born artist lives in Hong Kong now. At the height of the pandemic, he didn't experience any differences in his way of living because there was nothing left for him to do but to obsess over his work in New York, which, he admitted, was no different to his usual routine.
Looking at these illustrations, you might easily assume that Joan Cornella is one twisted, mentally disturbed person, and that he should probably seek help, but you couldn't be more wrong in this regard. In fact, he's very lucid about his works, and is very sensitive when somebody can't differentiate between fiction and reality, as well as the art and the artist. He doesn't consider himself to be a cynical person in the popular sense of the word, which is that a person lacks any sort of trust towards humanity and acts on self-interest. However, he's greatly interested in cynicism, which is a philosophical school of thought that originated from the pupils of Socrates.
It may come as no surprise that Joan Cornella actively speaks out against limiting people's freedom of expression. And even though he "should've been canceled by now," as one Vice article said, he strangely hasn't, and his active stance towards censorship might've helped him stay that way. Despite avoiding getting cancelled altogether, he's no stranger to frequent bans from Instagram and other social media platforms, and by this point, he has lost count of the times his images got suspended. Joan is, or at least was, often confused by these measures from social media platforms, since he clearly sees them as works of fiction, while some take the irony quite literally, get offended, and ask for censorship.
It's been very interesting to learn about Joan Cornella's influences in one of his many interviews. His vintage-esque style was inspired by old graphics through the works of Crumb, Clowes or Michael Kupperman, as well as Pettibon, Michael Ray Charles and Barbara Kruger, who all indirectly introduced him to the aesthetic he developed later on. Joan loves the naivete of the old advertisements, where there's lots of fake smiles. He once said that his own "smiling face" wasn't borrowed from just one source of inspiration, but is more of a mix of many faces, like the ones from Aphex Twin albums, Goya's characters, or "a random real-world guy who pretends his life is OK but is selling [lousy] banking products."
