After experiencing a break up, Carlín Díaz looks for a better tomorrow with a revived outlook on life

After spending pretty much all of spring and summer last year working on the wonderful animation Should I for WeTransfer, Carlín Díaz had understandably had enough of working digitally. After taking a well-deserved break, he went back to the drawing board, contemplating all the different forms of his practice and wondering what to do next? He finally decided to combine all the technical styles he’s developed over the years into one consolidated project. Mixing the digital with painting, collage, typography and graphic design; for the first time in his career, the Venezuelan creative has pulled together a variety of interests into one cohesive project.

Above all however, Carlín’s latest project Imaginary Posters and Covers for A Better Tomorrow focusses on what he loves most, music. “I love music so much and I owe a big part of my inspiration to it,” he tells us of this unexpected passion. He started to introduce music into his practice last year when commissioned to make Should I. In the autobiographical two minute animation, the protagonist, Michael, is going through a rough time, a break up to be precise. He feels lonely, overthinking a torrent of thoughts, and it’s only once he starts listening to music that he begins to calm down.

So when he started working on his next project, Carlín decided to make music a central aspect of the project. He plugged into the Chilean folk ensemble, Inti-Illimani, which brought with it a sense of security, and with a fluid rush of creativity spurred by the instrumental rhythms, he embarked on a new way of working.

For Carlín, a fresh blank canvas is a “therapeutic and healing” process, a reminder of the joys of working on a new project. Personally, this new work also marked a new chapter as Should I marked the closing of his seven-year-long relationship. Though it helped him to see his melancholy from an objective perspective, this new work, Imaginary Posters and Covers for A Better Tomorrow became a way to do that exactly: work towards a better tomorrow.

Pouring a new and enlightened outlook into the series, one image in particular, aptly titled Living Today embodies Carlín’s refreshed attitude. “It’s a reminder that the only thing I should care about is to enjoy the every day,” he tells us. In another image The Addiction Cycle, Carlín delves into his pained struggle to quit smoking, a relatively recent decision albeit a hard one. And in this vein, the series is boundlessly hopeful in composition. His revived point of view seeps into the beautifully illustrated images as each image is bright in both metaphor and composition. He makes use of cheerful colour palettes, promising himself happier days to come, hopefully leaving the heartache of break up behind.

“I’m always trying to figure out how to give a painting that sensibility and soul,” the illustrator-cum-designer tells us. After copious amounts of experimentation, he thinks he may have landed on a solution. To combine different textures – digital, typographic and illustrative – all into one image to achieve this. Hoping to develop this material exploration in the future, Carlín’s primary aspiration at the moment is to “create artworks with a constructive message” especially “as the world seems to go in the opposite direction each day.” Fundamentally, the series is a gentle, visually soothing reminder of the simple pleasures in life that are all-too-often forgotten amidst the need to pay rent, meet deadlines and so on.