Making it better

Feel-good superstar / Austrian-American graphic designer, storyteller and typographer, Stefan Sagmeister, is a walking, talking... symbol of personal branding whose savvy-sounding aptronym is a statement in itself: "sag" as in "sagen" (German for "to talk") + "meister" ("master") = "master of (creative) expression".

Best known for The Happy Show, a fun turn-style-buster held at the Big Apple's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in the spring of 2012, Sagmeister is the MC of "BETTER", a brain-nudging eye-opener to be seen at La Térmica, Malaga's experimental arts hub housed in a former post-Civil War orphanage on the western outskirts of the city, until 2 March.

A graduate of Vienna's University of Applied Arts and beneficiary of a Fulbright Scholarship, leading to a Fine Arts MA acquired at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he and his design company have made their mark over the past three decades, this unstoppable style-setter has the gift of the gab.

An idiosyncratic combo of "Things have never been better" good news-mongering statements and statistics remixed with recycled, geometrically customised vintage paintings, the La Térmica show sticks in the mind.

Unlike certain conceptual artists who coerce the onlooker into scrutinising explanatory notes up close, the design-meister behind the mega optimistic theory deployed here reaches out to the visitor with XXL typography.

Tall, blithe and dapper, "Stefan, The King of Cool" has a spring in his step with roots in rock and roll. His first claim to fame as a multipronged designer was his knack for packaging CDs, sparked by Lou Reed's 1996 release Set the Twilight Reeling; his flair for dreaming up iconic inserts, along the lines of the roaring lion booklet in the Rolling Stones album Bridges to Babylon, turned him into a twice-over Grammy Award winner. In 2005, in the Best Boxed or Special Limited-Edition category, for Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads. In 2010, for Best Recording Package (of David Byrne and Brian Eno's Everything that Happens Will Happen Today).

Further signs of success include life achievement accolades, on both sides of the Atlantic - and, more recently, in 2018... being voted Austrian of the Year by the Viennese daily Die Presse.

As I write, the passing of another controversial, if brilliant, creative director, has hit the news wires, minutes ago, with headlines in the spirit of CNN's "Oliviero Toscani, photographer behind shock Benetton ads, dies...".

Come to think of it, there is a touch of "Benetton-ology" running through the fabric of this exhibition, which features clothes incorporating Stefan Sagmeister's habitual visual codes, such as image-blanking shapes, strangely reminiscent of the black strips that conceal the eyes of patients in medical manuals.

The Benetton analogy is anything but far-fetched. Our spruce sexagenarian's mentor was Budapest-born Tibor Kalman, the artistic originator of the seminal Benetton-funded Colors magazine, to which a younger upwardly mobile Sagmeister contributed, at the beginning of his career, before being promoted to editor-in-chief.

Living proof of the "As long as they're talking about you" adage, maestro Stefan is an unrepentant provocateur. Echoing the cringe factor of self-injuring body art, he once embossed his torso with lettering, cutting into his own flesh (which, according to him, "left no scars" as his skin "heals easily"). The subtext of that experiment? To record the pain of seeking inspiration. His way around designer's block? To embark on year-long sabbaticals every seven years. Students aspiring to his level of success speak of "taking a Sagmeister".

The happy-go-lucky Sagmeister theory finds elliptical beauty in numbers: in figures, dates and percentages that resituate human occurrences in the long term (less infant mortality, more literacy...), in order to demonstrate that we worry too much - or rather, worry about the wrong things.

No mere anti-gloom 'n' doom boomer, the author of Better is Now is an oddball: exhibiting in galleries and museums, but reluctant to position himself as an artist; keen to tackle present environmental issues, yet determined to present past scientific and technological advances in a positive light.

In two words, the "Mister Austria" of graphic design is a "faux supervillain". Jack Nicholson's wicked grin is missing from the Joker-like poster, awaiting curious-minded attendees at the gates of La Térmica.