Last week we brought you news of Evil Angel’s latest endeavor, a clothing line designed by an erotic artist named Ricky Carrefero. But it turns out Ricky Carrefero may have been bombarded with allegations of evil once before. Welcome, dear reader, to the contentious world of erotic illustration.
Back in the early 2000s, a Los Angeles artist named Armando Huerta claimed that another man in his same line of work was passing Huerta’s work off as his own. The alleged plagiarist had been painting over portions of Huerta’s images and signing his own name, effectively changing nothing but the source (so, everything). The alleged plagiarist even managed to have a book containing a many such pieces published by SQP Art Books. The name of the alleged plagiarist? Ricky Carralero. Hmmm – that sounds familiar…
Now, there’s every chance that two men with almost identical names were working the same brush ‘n’ ink beat at the same time, but fuck… Was the artist behind Evil Angel’s new apparel endeavor also a thief, a phony, a plagiarist? Lingering doubts about the spelling of Carrefero and Carralero (and whatever other variations might exist) kept me searching. The only notable results appearing via Google for a “Ricky Carrefero” related to the announcement of Evil Angel’s clothing line about which I previously blogged, leaving me to wonder whether if “Ricky Carrefero” isn’t just a (barely) new name adopted by the same guy who allegedly ripped off Huerta. (And, by “allegedly” I mean “according to everyone posting at this blog“.) Or perhaps, as this post on the news page of Wicked Kulture, the website Carralero’s runs for his so-named erotic apparel company (natch!) refers to the man who’ll be applying color to cotton for EA by the same spelling that appears in Wicked Kulture’s byline and the front cover of the SQP Publication mentioned earlier, Art Premiere #1, Ricky Carralero is the only person Ricky Carralero can rely on to spell Ricky Carralero correctly.