Carlos Sánchez Pérez

Carlos Sánchez Pérez (31 May 1958 – 7 September 2018), known professionally as Ceesepe, was a Spanish painter, comics artist and illustrator. He was especially prolific in drawings and collages, with his style is often classified as pop art. He is considered a major figure in La Movida Madrileña. His pseudonym is based on the Spanish pronunciation of his initials: C: ce, S: ese, P: pe = "Ceesepe".

In 2011, he received Spain's Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts.

Biography At sixteen years old, halfway through the 1970s, Ceesepe was introduced to the world of underground comix, coming into contact with Barcelonian artists and illustrators such as Max, Nazario Luque, and Javier Mariscal. He worked with them in Barcelona up until 1979. He was one of the most popular painters in the artistic boom of La Movida Madrileña. His work at that stage consisted of screen prints, film posters, album covers, and illustrations.

"My older brother drew and my father and grandfather were carpenters. I was in art school for like a month and left it. That's all my artistic training. There were a lot of people there that drew better than me. I could spend a week with a drawing that they did in a day, and mine would be half crooked, but they knew it was mine." — Ceesepe, Vanity Fair He created the poster for Pedro Almodóvar's first feature-length film, Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), and would go on to create eight films himself.

"The time that most interests me is the birth and expansion of photography and painting's reaction to that. There are some years of convergence of many things and concepts that for me are still valid." — Ceesepe

After abandoning comics halfway through the 1980s, he devoted himself mostly to painting, holding exhibitions in places such as Amsterdam, Paris, Angoulême, Geneva, Bali, New York City, and Madrid (Centro Cultural de la Villa, 1985; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1991). In 1984, he participated in a collective exhibition in Barcelona's Fundació Joan Miró.

He also created more film posters, such as the one for Almódovar's Law of Desire (1987), and in his final period designed title pages for the Spanish edition of Rolling Stone. The New Yorker hired him on 22 November 1993 for one of their covers.

His work has been collected in books such as Dibujos (1982), Barcelona By Night (1982), París-Madrid (1985), El difícil arte de mentir (1986), Libro blanco (1990), and Ars morundi (1990).