Joe Cool is the alter ego of Snoopy, the iconic beagle from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip. When Snoopy puts on sunglasses and leans casually against a wall, he becomes “Joe Cool”—a college-age persona meant to appear smooth and effortlessly detached. But that’s the trick: it’s all an act. A character inside another character. Snoopy trying on someone else’s confidence, which already hints at layers of irony, longing, and performance.
That fragile performance—style used as self-protection—is exactly the type of cultural gesture Freire returns to in her work. Much of what she creates exists in the tension between surface polish and emotional residue, between the image we project and what’s underneath it. Joe Cool, as a cultural reference, is well-suited to that kind of interrogation.
In this piece, Freire places the figure on one of her signature bears, then scrawls over it with emotionally loaded text—raw, expressive, and intentionally disruptive. The glasses, the lean, the red sweater: they offer one message, until the handwriting begins to speak louder. What first feels familiar begins to unravel, becoming more vulnerable and less easily defined. The piece isn’t simply about Snoopy. It’s about the performances we maintain, and what leaks through when they stop working.
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