Shading face

Federico’s career as a drawer began as a child, when he escaped to his room to copy his favorite cartoons. This devotion for comics, with the mixture of storytelling and image, is what explains his career as a drawer, painter and illustrator, on the one hand, but also as a playwright and screenwriter on the other.

It was in the late seventies when he began to publish professionally in magazines that were part of the so-called “boom” of comics in Spain (Totem, Rambla, etc.). So that, without a voice of his own or a complete education, he found himself learning on the job, directly addressing the readers.

This apprenticeship ends in the eighties, when he joined the group of regular collaborators of the magazine Madriz. From that moment on, he began a more personal path and developed a form of expression that was less linked to his referents. His first book, La Orilla, dates from this period.

The Madriz’s experience culminated with another magazine, Medios revueltos, which tried to keep alive a disappearing language. Leon Doderlin, his second book, belongs to this period.

Already in the nineties, the great transformation of Federico in Silvestre took place, his other self. In 1996 in France, Relations is published, the first book of this new author who breaks completely with his past and begins a new more experimental journey. At the same time, he continued working as a professional cartoonist publishing books (one of which, El artefacto perverso, wins the Barcelona Salon prize for the best album). And he has launched his first play, El día que voló Renata, with the theater company El canto de la Cabra.

His colaboration with this theater company will continue throughout the decade and produce at least three more plays: Viaje al Tártaro, Caín y ¿Qué? Nada. At the same time in 1999, Silvestre publishes Simple, his second book. In 1998 he began to work as a cartoonist in the newspaper La Razón, where he still remains, forming part of the team that signs as Cain (graphic humor award Tono in 2007).

As an illustrator, he has published several other books in the past years: El hombre de arena, with Mai Prol; Spaniards, ya tenéis patria, with Ángeles Lario and De otro vida, with Isabel Bono. Tiempo que dura esta claridad, with Elisa Gálvez, will be published in 2018.