“I am what I do. I would like to be imprisoned for several years in prison so I can do calligraphy in peace and without anyone bothering me. I just want to live, I have almost nothing now and I want to reach the moment of having nothing. “My mother said that the happy man had no shirt and now I understand it perfectly.” Ricardo Rousselot, 87 years old, was born in the Argentine jungle, in the Chaco, where as a child he sensed modernity in a large oval bronze plaque, the logo of the British capital locomotive that crossed his father’s factory loaded with quebracho trunks. colored. He was four years old and cows or houses with smoking chimneys never appeared in his drawings, only letters. He wrote them on the ground, with a stick, and when he passed by someone asked him: “What does it say?” “Nothing,” they responded. “But how can he not say anything?”

Now, he says, if he had been paid five euros for each letter he has drawn, he would be one of the richest men on the planet. He has been everything in the world of design, something like a god of calligraphy, typography and lettering, the art of drawing letters. He is the father of the visual identity of the Smoking or La Casera cigarette papers, of the logos of Casa Tarradellas, Ducados or El Corte Inglés, of the masthead of La Vanguardia, of the design of the Carlos I Imperial cognac bottle or the box. of wood in red and albero of the Farias cigars, whose design and graphics summarize the essence of Spain of the moment.

“If one day I retire, the bureaucracy will retire me. But I will continue doing exactly the same thing I do now. I am what I do. And I’m not going to withdraw that facet of my life because some papers say so. I’m going to continue working the rest of my life. What do you want me to do?”. With these words Rousselot says goodbye to Letters that Mark, a documentary in which he is the protagonist, recently released on the CaixaForum and Filmin platform. The director of the film, Àlex Guimerà, began filming almost five years ago, and in the middle of the pandemic, Rousselot experienced the loss of Edy, the woman of his life, with whom he shared 63 years (“I still can’t see a photograph his without crying”), and has undergone spinal surgery. It is difficult for him to get around, but he maintains the youthful “tarannà” and yes, from time to time he continues to go to the studio that he shares with his children, Carlos and Cynthia (Erre Rousselot Group). “Maybe someone hit the handle so hard that he can’t stop,” he laughs.

He has been glued to letters for a lifetime. The first half on the other side of the pond and the other, in Barcelona. At the age of 15 he worked with his brother Juan, a journalist, on the radio, and already in Buenos Aires “I made the typical walk of the poor unfortunate person looking for work with a little folder in which he kept some works. What I would pay for it today, because for me it was the greatest thing in the world!” In Buenos Aires they gave him a test and they liked it so much that on the first day they already paid him “more money than he had.” He charged “50 dollars per word, a fortune.” “I had had everything. He collected things. One day I sold everything and was left with one suitcase. Nothing else. He told my wife ‘life would be happy if we only had that suitcase’. ‘But the kids, the house, the school, the car…’ Fuck the car!

Rousselot arrived in Barcelona in 1975 after a stay in Chicago, where he embraced joy, shook off all solemnity and rubbed shoulders with design greats like Saul Bass. She arrived here after a family conclave (his wife, from Cádiz, who was looking for the sea, won) and found a city in transformation that lived in permanent sarao and whose image she helped to renew. In the documentary, we see him entering La Vanguardia, which in 1981, on the occasion of his centenary, commissioned him to create a commemorative stamp and redesign the masthead. Then, he remodeled it himself in 2007. Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Rosa Mundet, the then chief design editor, commissioned him to provide the illustrations for a Cultura|s special with the books of the year for 2021. “It’s as if an award Nobel wrote an article for us.”

The admiration that Rousselot arouses among his colleagues is one of the guiding threads of the film. His friend and collaborator Óscar Tusquets, who already prefaced his autobiography (says that his work is evidence that “the hand is the extension of the brain; the hand thinks.” An artisanal hand, that of the traditional designer, today amputated by the new “As Vargas Llosa said, a computer screen has never been wet by the tears of a man in love,” recalls Rousselot, who, although it pains him, cannot help but be ironic about the fact that he has not yet been awarded the National Prize for Design: “What sucks is that they don’t give it to you because maybe you’re not worth it.”