José Antonio Suárez Londoño

Critical text

The prints, drawings, sketchbooks, and rubber stamps produced by José Antonio Suárez Londoño (b. 1955, Medellín) since the 1970s together form an immense body of work, since Londoño has been working with the utmost concentration, developing a vast repertoire of small-scale drawings, etchings, and prints. He started drawing from a very young age and at a certain time he decided to consecrate all his time to drawing night and day during the week, a practise that would continue for months and then year after year until the present day—developing his work in a highly structured studio practice like an inventory of the world and a personal diary. Since a while, he has been routinely producing yearly notebooks filled with eclectic drawings of objects, landscapes, portraits, textile patterns, reproductions of Old Master paintings, and color studies. Known as The Yearbooks, these notebooks function as a visual autobiography of the everyday revealing his intimate thoughts and literary, artistic, and musical interests. His work is a diaristic commentary on his literary interests and everyday activities—a visual synthesis that reflected his previous training in biology and his childhood obsession with the illustrated Larousse encyclopedic dictionary.

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge