ZARA MAN X SEBASTIAN CURI

ZARA is a Spanish apparel retailer based in Spain. The company specializes in fast fashion, and their products include clothing, accessories, shoes, swimwear, beauty, and perfumes. Their website has 12.000.000 millions visits every day and 1.700 stores all over the world.

At the beginning of 2022 I was approached by the ZARA MAN team to create a summer clothing collection in collaboration with the brand. The collection is inspired on my work of hand drawings, loose patterns and vibrant figures.The Clothing Collection consist of ten garments: five t-shirts, a bucket hat, shorts, a matching sweatshirt, a bowling shirt, silk bandana and socks. All featuring big colored shapes, bold patterns and vibrant colors on different gradients of white.

This collection is manufactured under the JOIN LIFE standards and every garment is produced using better processes and more sustainable raw materials.

What Color is the Color of the sky? I’m concerned with the how. How you actually represent rather than why or what. The how has a great effect on what we see. It’s all about an opinion about its subject. It should have a point of view. It’s not about likeness. And the subject matter can even be secondary. But for me it is all about building gestures. A way of looking at things. A language that lets me talk about the things that I want to talk about. In this collaboration with ZARA we created a set of garments that highlight my drawing work. Hands gestures mainly but also other works that play with graphic representation and iconography. All the work intends to be simple and fun. The artworks carry a lightness and contagious positivity where I can see myself. Every artwork is aimed to reconcile serious aesthetic intentions and ease of communication with people outside the art world. Color does not serve a decorative purpose, but a functional one. Vibrant colors are the ones that are most stimulating and that lead to a deeper conversation with the observer. Scale is big. And color depends so much on quantity. Even if the graphics have a link to the subject matter or a prettiness to the color, I want them to be confrontational in some way. Scale is one way to do that. For this project I worked on a range of mediums. From acrylic paintings to digital sketches and charcoal drawings. A lot of pencil and paper. Line studies first and then colored works that play with the negative space of the canvas. All pieces have contributed to a signature style of stylised figures and cartoonish characters. A scared cat, a gesture of a hand, simple shapes and primary colors. I drew more than 200 sketches and painted something like 50 artworks. I was totally new to the process of creating a piece of clothing and it's been exciting and challenging in the same measure. Every artwork It’s a glimpse of a passing thing and the drawing holds that in a better way than a photo could do.