About Yago Partal.
Yago Partal, photographer and visual artist in Barcelona. Creator of Animal Kinhood — formerly Zoo Portraits: digital animal portraits with a name, a job and a life.
Biography
I'm Yago Partal. As a kid I didn't draw out of any calling: I drew to be somewhere else. Whole notebooks of monsters and of creatures that didn't exist. At school they called me «the little faggot who was good at drawing», and the notebook was the way out of there.
At sixteen they found a tumor on my spine and I spent years in and out of operating rooms. What's left of it is my left hand, half-asleep, never fully responding. I bring it up because ever since, I look at an image differently. The first thing I made once I was out was self-portraits. Then whole series — Violencia, Intimidad fantasma, Deformidad — all digital, all of bodies that didn't fit into any clean box.
I did the arts track in high school and went on to Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Fridays were for the Icaria cinemas with Manel: two films in the original language, one before lunch and one after, and the rest of the day arguing about them. That's where I learned to look slowly, which is more or less the only thing I'm good at.
In 2003 I set up a studio with a friend. It closed soon after: we had no idea what we were doing. Years later I joined DDT, a special-effects workshop, as a concept designer, and the mask and the mannequin for «The Skin I Live In» came out of there. Two years making creatures. Behind every monster there's a hand that builds it, and that has served me for everything since.
The dressed animals arrived in 2012, almost sideways, under the name Zoo Portraits. The following year they went viral and one morning I woke up to an inbox full of brands, press and strangers from half the world. Out of that came the teNeues book, the galleries and the commissions. Between those first two batches of characters I ended up with more than five hundred.
Over the years I rebuilt it from the root and called it Animal Kinhood. Same frontal framing, same clean background, except now each one has a name, a job and a life: Otto is an arctic fox who wakes at a quarter past three without an alarm, because his body decides for him. None of these animals is a photo of a real animal. I create each one by combining licensed photography, photomontage, textures and AI-generated fragments as source material, then assembling and finishing it by hand in layers. The composition and the authorship are mine. I was working this way long before there was AI.
§ 02.A.1The first things I made.
§ 02.A.2Where it has been.
The first Zoo Portraits show was in Tokyo, at UltraSuperNew, in October 2013. Then came Siem Reap, London, Lyon, Saché, Monaco, Barcelona and the Chimei Museum in Tainan, which holds art and natural history under one roof. Of all of them, that's where the work has sat best.
§ 02.A.3Collaborations & clients.
Apple put one of my portraits in its global iOS 10 ad. Adobe commissioned three lions for «Be a Lion» at Cannes Lions, and The Body Shop the whole «Go Wild» campaign, from posters to packaging. With Queensland's tourism department we did Australian wildlife. My work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, CBS News, Time Out and Daily Mail.
§ 02.A.4What I'm working on.
It took me a long time to know what my own thing was called. Autism with high intellectual ability, diagnosed as an adult, after a whole life spent putting on a face to pass as normal. I was wearing two masks at once, the autism one and the gay one, and both are learned the same way: watching everyone else and hiding whatever's left over. When I was finally able to take it off, it didn't disappear. It became material, and I've made whole series out of it.
For years I found it hard to show both faces at once, the animals and the darker work, as if I had to choose between the one people like and the one I am. Not anymore. They do the same job: taking what gets pushed aside and giving it a face so you can't walk past without looking. I named my son Elliot, after the boy in E.T. He still doesn't know where the name comes from. For now we build things together with our hands, his and mine, the one that works and the one that does as it pleases.
If you have a question about how something is made, get in touch. What is for sale is in the shop.