My name is Elliana Esquivel, on social media, known as the artist Elesq responsible for the drawing "The Chaos and the Calm" (feel free to google it, it will be easy to find). After receiving numerous photos, videos, and links from my followers of what seemed to be my very personal journal drawing "The Chaos and the Calm" redrawn about three dozen times and hanging on a wall in some shop in Barcelona I had never heard of, I realized it was obvious that someone was using my art to make thousands. After ducking my calls for days, I was finally able to contact shop owner and "artist" / Maxo himself.
Maxo (who had the audacity to sell shrewd copies of my drawing for nearly $300 USD a piece while mine run at around $20 max) quite rudely informed me that he had no idea the drawing wasn't his (that was literally word-for-word his excuse) and claimed he would remove the drawings as quickly as possible. To make a long story short, he didn't. In fact, he continued selling them and blocked me on every social media platform. I then encouraged my supporters to review his shop on Google and notify the public that this man is a con artist. After my followers had posted nearly 200 reviews warning people, an hour later and every single 1 star review suddenly vanished.
Maxo was deleting any review that rated him below 4 stars.
It was then that I was informed by two students living in Barcelona, that Maxo had actually threatened them in the past. When the students asked him to sit down for an interview for their school, he said he was a very busy, successful man and demanded that they write at least 15 fake 5 star reviews for his Google, Facebook, etc for this interview to be worth his time. When they denied this strange request (feeling fishy about the whole situation) Maxo sent them an unhealthy amount of nasty text messages and voicemails. He even contacted the head of their art school and attempted to slander them, claiming that the two students would never amount to anything and that they were completely talentless. The student who spoke to me about the situation described herself as feeling "incredibly scared and threatened" by not only the amount of harassing messages he sent her, but also the way in which he visited her school.
To this day, Maxo has been stealing my art for 3 years straight. He has threatened teenage girls. And if you think for a moment that he hasn't stolen artwork from dozens of other artists like myself, I strongly urge you to reconsider.
Maxo is a conartist. read more