In Love With the Planet, Dreaming of Leaving It: Fran Rodríguez's Digital Collage

When Fran Rodríguez was seven, his grandmother kept a stack of gossip magazines, and he took scissors to them. He cut out heads and put them on other people's bodies, or on animals. Weird creatures with animal heads and human shoulders.

Nearly forty years later, he's still making collages. The scissors are digital.

In high school he wrote his name on desks and textbooks, "not being a graffiti artist," he clarifies, just marking things. He was the kid who noticed. "I paid attention to things that my friends or my family or people around me wasn't paying attention to," he says. "And I always felt the need to express what I felt about those things."

He grew up in Torrelavega, a small town on the northern coast of Spain, in country he describes as wild. Deep forests and mountains, and hardly anyone. "You have bears, you have wolves, you have crazy fauna." His family hiked and camped, and at night they lay out watching for shooting stars. Everything in his work that points upward started there.

His parents loved music and books and films but never made anything themselves. They came from families without much money, and "maybe they didn't have anyone who supported them in that direction." "I think I'm the first one in the family."

At fourteen or fifteen his parents bought him two art books, one on Dalí and one on René Magritte. He already knew Dalí. In Spain, everyone does. Magritte was new.

"Magritte blew my mind, blew me away," he says. Through Magritte he found Giorgio de Chirico, and then the psychedelic music of the '60s and everything that came with it, the album covers, the photographs, the particular color and texture of that decade. Classic surrealism crossed with '60s psychedelia became his style. He calls it dreamy surrealism, which is exactly right.

Around 2000, at twenty, he found Photoshop. "That blew my mind. That changed my life." He studied graphic design for four years, but the school was mostly about software, and the real education happened at night. "Spending hours and hours with no sleep, looking at online forums." In the early 2000s those forums were full of artists showing their process "with full transparency," and he learned there.

Two living artists shaped him more than anyone. Leif Podhajsky, the Australian designer behind album covers for Tame Impala and Foals, and Neil Krug, the photographer behind much of Lana Del Rey's album art. Both work where music and image meet, which is where he'd end up.

In 2010, at thirty, he'd spent eight years at an agency making flyers and cheap logos, "very, very corporate shit." He tried to build a portfolio and couldn't find a single thing he was proud of. "I consider myself an artist, but I couldn't find anything worth putting up on the website." A breakup landed at the same time. "Both things combined, they broke me."

He quit, opened an online print shop, and started making work only for himself. Five prints a month, then ten, then a living. He hasn't made a logo or a brochure since.

He also started messaging bands he loved. "Ninety percent, they don't respond or they don't even read the messages." A few did, and the covers snowballed. In 2017, Rivers Cuomo saw his collage of a girl on a swing hanging over space and wanted it for Weezer's Pacific Daydream. Fran was a huge Weezer fan. National newspapers in Spain called. It was the turning point, and album covers are now the only commissions he takes.

His first psychedelic trip came at twenty-nine or thirty. He was already making digital collage, and the work was cosmic and spacey and mostly black. Mushrooms changed the palette.

"When you are on a heavy mushroom trip, you see colors that you don't see ever again," he says. "That's a red, but that red, I haven't seen it before, and I wouldn't see it again."

He started using bright, saturated color and never stopped. He rarely goes there since becoming a father, and doesn't need to. He can recall how it felt and rebuild it on the screen. "I think I can recreate through my art what I saw."

Asked for his main theme, he names a book. The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley's account of taking mescaline, argues that we're capable of perceiving far more than we do, and that evolution filtered most of it out so we could get through the day.

"I love the idea that we have the potential to perceive a lot more things than the ones that we do," he says. "My work tries to reflect that idea. That there's a higher level of perception, a higher level of understanding reality."

He thinks about it concretely. We see the colors of the rainbow while infrared and X-rays and radio waves pass through the room unnoticed. On a good trip, alone or with very few people, touching a wall or a tree, "you just sense that there's something there."

He's careful to say drugs aren't the only door. Meditation gets you there, and so can a contemplative life. "Or maybe even just going hiking in nature and staring at the sky for an hour. You get a glimpse of there's something more."

Most pieces start as two words in his phone. The one he's releasing next week began as a vision of a grove of cypresses where one lifts off and starts rising. He wrote down "cypress flying" or "flying cypresses." He isn't sure which, and he laughs about it.

He became a father six years ago, and now gets three or four hours at the computer on a good day. He used to spend days or weeks sliding layers around until something clicked and he got his eureka. Now most of that happens before he sits down.

"I have this vision of the Photoshop interface in my mind," he says. "Here it would be a forest. Here some trees. Here a sphere floating, or a pyramid. Here a person levitating." Some pieces he's finished entirely in his head before touching the machine. "I know it sounds a bit lunatic."

What people recognize in his work is wide open space and things floating that shouldn't. People, trees, pyramids, spheres. He wants the viewer to stop and ask why. "That what the fuck feeling," he says. He has no interest in art that explains itself, and abstraction doesn't hold him either. He wants a tree, a person, a deer, a mountain, "arranged in a way that breaks your mind a little." Doors and portals turn up constantly for the same reason. They pose one question and never answer it. What's behind the door?

Music runs underneath all of it, from the moment he wakes up through the walk to collect his kids from school. Ambient, cinematic, mostly wordless. Every series starts with a song.

Exodus II drops next week on SuperRare, a one-of-one following Exodus from last year. Both hold two feelings he doesn't think of as opposites. "Nature is gorgeous and I love this planet," he says. "But I also dream or fantasize about leaving it." The cypress rising out of the grove is both at once.

He uses AI now for some raw material, the skies and mountains he used to dig out of nineteenth-century oil paintings, then cuts them up in Photoshop like everything else. He thinks artists should say so openly, the way Chema Mendez does. "In the proper hands, it's a powerful tool."

The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley.

The work of Leif Podhajsky. "I think he's a genius."

And northern Spain, instead of Barcelona or Madrid or the Mediterranean coast. Americans who love Yellowstone and Montana, he says, would be surprised by what's up there.