Meet Mr Rodriguez…

Ego Rodriguez is one of the East End’s foremost LGBT artists and illustrators.
To mark the exhibition of his ‘Macho’ collection at the Dalston Superstore, we caught up with him to find out more about his life, art and sometime sexually themed work…

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’ve been living in London for eighteen years, and I’m originally from Spain. I’ve been doing illustrations since I was a kid, and having little jobs here and there, but lately in the past four, five years it was when I started to concentrate and take it more seriously as a job.
Was it hard to make it into a job?
Yes, it was horrible. It’s not something you can make into a living straight away but you just have to build it up. And work as many places as you can and try to do as many things. The thing is as well for me I don’t like to use the commercial. I don’t like to offer myself as ‘I do anything illustrative’, I don’t like to be generic.
Does your work reflect LGBT themes?
Not all of them. I mean, I think with Macho, one of the things I find interesting about them is that I have lesbian friends who love it, they like the whole ‘macho’ guy. They think it’s really cool and comic, and interesting. And then gay guys love it because they find it sexy, and then friends that are trans love it as well because of the sense of the whole sexuality about how they can be so masculine or not. Straight friends love it because it’s so over over-the-top masculine. I think I like that, how different people in different sets in different worlds can actually find a common interest in an image. I don’t even think of it as gay, it was supposed to be straight originally, ideas coming from the Playgirl magazine. It was supposed to be addressed to women.
So you’re subverting?
Exactly. You see with these guys and the pictures and the posters and so on they’re so camp and most of them are gay because they were gay actors in porn etc, but they were just doing Playgirl because Playgirl was an undercover gay magazine. But to be honest, I think I liked that kind of darkness about it, even if it’s really flashy and poppy, there’s something dark and hidden about the whole.
It says on your website you’re fascinated by ‘macabre, dark corners, lost memories’.
When you are a teenager, and people tell you you’re weird, or your ideas are a bit bizarre, of course at that time it makes you the weird, strange kid in the corner, but when you’ve grown up you use it to express yourself and people actually find it interesting. I like to think of it as part of going deeper, rather than just the surface. I’m interested in dark, but not dark as just related to death or the macabre, but dark as in the sense of what people like to hide away.
And how does that influence Macho?
Some people found it sexual but some people found it pretty because the lines and everything are just nice and colourful. So there’s that pop sense about it, something that you can have everywhere, on a sticker or a handbag, you see around and it’s nice and fun. But then, it’s hairy, naked men, there’s something sexual and a bit pervy in a way, and I like that kind of playful thing.
And how did you get involved with showing your art here at Dalston Superstore?
Because I started the posters for Nancy’s, so I know Dan and Matt and the company, I know them from before as well. Matt asked ‘why don’t you have the Macho guys here and we can connect it with Nancy’s?’ and we were like ‘cool, why not?’ I had an exhibition with them before as a kind of smaller thing. These ones are going to be quite big, eight with the long lightbulbs and a single guy each. They’re going to be quite in your face!