Welcome to Paco Roca’s Stone Age and Beyond.
Since La Cúpula published his first professional work in 2001, Paco Roca has released album after album and become one of the most prominent figures in the national and international comic book scene. Through his unique and ever-evolving style, as well as his ability to tackle themes such as memory, the passage of time, loneliness, and family, and to tell profound and moving stories, Paco connects intimately with readers, conveying universal emotions. He draws well, but he writes and narrates even better.
But was it always like that?
No, it wasn’t. Paco was born in 1969, and like everyone else, he had his own “Stone Age”: a time of wonder and learning. Fascinated by animation and comics, he preferred a pencil to a soccer ball. From a young age, he created homemade fanzines, designed Fallas (Valencia’s traditional sand sculptures), and used markers to remember The Empire Strikes Back, the movie that had such a profound impact on him. Luckily, his mother, Antonia, kept many of those doodles.
Paco continued to draw in his usual surroundings—at school, for the Fallas, for friends—and later, right after finishing art school, for magazines, advertising agencies, and, perhaps with more mundane interests, for trendy nightclubs.
Then, in the second half of the 1990s, after publishing some erotic stories in Kiss Comix magazine, he began contributing to El Víbora, one of the era's leading publications.
This exhibition explores precisely that period. It shows works that few authors, even those with Paco Roca's prestige, would dare to display. They reveal his origins, naivety, evolution, perseverance, and doubts during the years he never stopped drawing. Because drawing is essential. It is a form of personal and creative expression that allows us to explore and communicate emotions from a young age. After childhood, most of us stopped doing it, but Paco never did.
From then until now, we have become familiar with everything Paco draws: El juego lúgubre (The Gloomy Game), Hijos de la Alhambra (Children of the Alhambra), The Lighthouse, Wrinkles, Las calles de arena (The Sand Streets), Emotional World Tour, Senderos (Paths), The Winter of the Cartoonist, Twists of Fate, The House, La encrucijada (The Crossroads), Confesiones de un hombre en pijama (Confessions of a Man in Pajamas), The Treasure of the Black Swan, El dibujado (The Drawn One), Return to Eden, El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Oblivion) and many more.
Welcome to Paco Roca’s Stone Age and Beyond.
