Ricardo Nunez Suarez is a Colombian freelance illustrator. He has worked all over the world in different capacities as a teacher, art director, and graphic designer. Nunez’s body of work can be seen on his website and Behance and it really deserves your attention. His talent as an illustrator is wholly unique, a mixture of surrealism, cheekiness and beauty. Looking at some of his pieces almost feel like looking at real magic frozen in frame mid spell.
Nunez presents many of his illustrations as series on a theme. Often they tell stories, either personal or reimagining representations of old stories, the myths/legends local to the setting of the series. Each collection is introduced with a statement on the types of stories being told in the images. Something I find interesting about his work is that many of these collections are based on the artist’s travels and stories he collected there and when I look at them, if I’m not super familiar with the culture, I have a hard time deciphering which of the illustrations are based in legend and which of them are the superimposing of Nunez’s imagination upon the world he’s seen.
There is a dream like quality to each of his pieces, whether it’s the way his colors are blended or cartoonish multicolored flora or literally a gigantic alligator stuck in the New York subway, Nunez is exploding with imaginative energy and clarity on how to wield it. It can’t be understated, everything he does has a perspective to it but that perspective is still married to a sense of beauty, either underlying or overt. There is at least one element to every one of his pieces that I find breathtaking. Ricardo Nunez Suarez is a must-see artist.
