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Argentine artist Ignacio Noe depicts classic cheesecake models cheerily posing as all hell breaks loose around them. Explosions, avalanches, nuclear accidents, giant beasts — none of it fazes Noe’s women in the least!
Argentine artist Ignacio Noe has published numerous books in a wide range of genres — from children’s books all the way to not-at-all children’s books. His most recent project, an erotic book called The Piano Tuner, just wrapped its Kickstarter funding campaign. You can see examples of his art on his Facebook page (and his workshop Facebook), his Instagram and his Blogspot blog.
A few years ago he combined his love of pinup art with more action-style illustration in a series called “Suddenly,” which finds classic cheesecake models cheerily posing as all hell breaks loose around them. Explosions, avalanches, nuclear accidents, giant beasts — none of it fazes Noe’s models in the least. We asked him just what’s going on here.
You have beautiful pinup girls here with all sorts of disaster or deadly chaos happening around them. That’s a bit of a contrast. Why are you combining these things?
That combining began to take shape in a comic. I’ve always had a fondness for the naive erotism in classic ’50s pinup, and in my comic book Exposition I found the opportunity to develop it. In this book, I show an old illustrator of pinups visiting the retrospective exhibition of his works. Each illustration shows a beautiful woman who is lightly stripped by a naive accident, and as he looks at each of them he remembers the sordid circumstances that inspired the image. In his memories, the accidents are dangerous, and the women ending completely undressed.
When I made the illustration portfolio “Suddenly” I focused on the intensity of accidents, not on the moral intention. In these illustrations, it is not a small accident that undresses the women but a great catastrophe. I started to create the images making a reference to a classic pin-up and playing with the contrasts. But then, I began to work on the meanings that this awakened in me and I felt that it was necessary to avoid the tragic, the gore, and the sarcasm, and as a consequence, little by little another idea emerged. Thus, the accident became an expression of the forces of nature in action and the beauty of women is one of these forces.
On one hand, these could be seen as damsels in distress — but on the other hand, they’re undisturbed or even amused by the chaos around them. How do you describe them?
The accidents of my illustrations are uncommon, there are no injuries or deaths. I avoid the tragic in my images, this gives me the possibility of seeing in the accidents only the action of the forces whose only consequence is undressing a woman. The girls smile because they do not feel threatened, they have nothing to fear, they accept nudity as an inevitable consequence of the accident because they are aware of its power. Nothing that happens is alien to them. By representing women and chaos united in this way, I feel that the beauty of women is revealed to us as one of the elemental forces of nature.
Now, in my more recent illustrations, I am working on this subject in a more explicit way. I am making a book with them.
These make us think of the weird pinups by Art Frahm, who always caught his women in a moment of panic as they are carrying groceries and their underwear falls down. But this is like Art Frahm with a lot more danger and no groceries. Was he — or was some other artist — an inspiration?
I know the illustrations of Art Frahm but I don’t like the image of the dropped panties. When I say that I love classic pinup I mean almost exclusively George Petty and especially Gil Elvgren.
George Petty’s watercolors are astonishing for their precision and subtle art deco stylization of his happy, carefree women. And Gil Elvgren’s oils set the standard and the best of style with his almost unaware women of their beauty and troubled by small domestic accidents. The character in my comic “Exposicion” is named Gil in homage to Elvgren.
The last two images here are from a new project in the “Suddenly” vein that Noe is currently developing.
Ignacio Noe has been published in the Argentinian magazines Fierro, Noticias, and Genios; as well as Lancio Story and Leternauta in Italy; and Kiss Comix in Spain. His books have been published by Delcourt, Dynamite, Les Sculpteurs de Bulles, Other Criteria, and Casterman. He is currently published by Advance Publishing in the U.S. and Glenat in Europe.
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