The jury of the Pepito Zamora award met in its first edition (November 2020). After deliberating on the importance of recognizing and retrieving LGTBI historical memory. Willing to pay tribute, to remember and to recover the legacy of the free artists who with their acts and vital example have defended the Human Rights and the cultural diversity and of thought. The jury has decided to award the honorary prize to Nazario Luque Vera.
Nazario Luque Vera (Castilleja del Campo, province of Seville, January 3, 1944) is an Andalusian cartoonist and painter, considered the father of Spanish underground comics, has received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2010 awarded to Nazario in 2011, the RAMBLA Prize for Visual Arts at NAZARIO (Barcelona, 2010), the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Prize of the Junta de Andalucía for the best career in the field of Plastic Arts, 2009; the Barcelona International Comic Fair Grand Prix in 2001; the Prize for the best creation of Costumes for his designs of BRAGUETES awarded by the Crítica Teatral de Barcelona, 1992/1993 .; the Sebastià Gasch Prize Jury Prize for “An ironic contribution and an approach to the comic of the music-hall costumes in the show Braguetes” in 1993; the Award for Best Screenwriter at the 3rd Madrid Comic Book Week in 1986.
From our organization we want to pay tribute to Nazario, a creator who has managed to capture the desires and reality, dreams and nightmares of the LGTBI community without stopping to touch the ground and blowing the imagination to the seventh heaven. Irreverent and devout, he has been able to mix traditional elements with themes of the most contemporary modernity. His talent lies in combining excess with human misery, making the most fantastic and surreal comics credible.
Its universe has captivated us and is already part of our cultural and countercultural identity, our private DNA and also collective RNA. Nazario is a mirror that distorts us by making us diverse and giving us back the desire to live and laugh, so necessary always, and perhaps today more than ever.
Nazario has become a public and popular person. An artist who represents the cultural values of communication, visibility, normalization and the fight for the rights of the LGTBI community, both in our country and abroad. And he has done so from his graphic stories, comics, and fictional characters like the tremendous Anarcoma. He has also managed to preserve the memory and works of unclassifiable artists, such as Ocaña, the transvestite painter of the Ramblas of Barcelona, Andalusian, homosexual and poor.
Agitator, transgressor, controversial, provocative, Nazario Luque responds to these adjectives and is also an artist misunderstood and committed to his time. Field, kitsch, tacky, queer, twisted or board are some of the changing rhetoric in the shed of political adaptations. Words that are transformed fleeing the mainstream. Concepts that only exist in relation to the rules that seek to coerce minorities and dissidents such as the gypsy people, those of migrants, those of transvestites, prostitutes, vagrants, those who live in the shallow bottoms of port cities such as Barcelona or Marseille and in tourist-residential suburbs with cosmopolitan airs such as Sitges.
Nazario’s drawn comics and reinvented comics are the most obvious proof of how counterculture has become an atopic and at the same time model revulsion to follow. Nazario mirrors the reflection of the reality of the Vè district and brings to life characters who live on the margins, happy artists who break patterns and become icons of popular culture, such as Ocaña, an example of resistance during the Franco dictatorship and a critic of the democratic transition.
Nazario, however, has not remained in the countercultural anecdote or in the cliché of the transformative folk of the environment but has twisted it, riveting the key, looking for a hypercritical vision of contemporary society, in each of the moments he has lived and lived. His conceptual turn towards self-portrait and the embodiment of alternative life make him deserving of the Pepito Zamora award, an honorary award created by the Gay Sitges Link LGTBI Association to recognize the trajectory of singular public figures, unique examples in maintenance. and the recovery of the memory of the LGTBI community.
In this link you can see the vídeo of delivery of the price and the interwiew done by Juan Pedro “La Secre”.
