A son of Cuban parents, Jose Ignacio Suarez Solis (1973) was born in Chile and arrived in Brazil as a child, settling in Bahia in 1974. He is an architect trained at the University of Oregon (USA), with experiences in New York, Copenhagen, and Helsinki.

His trajectory combines architecture, drawing, and sculpture, emphasizing research on materialities and the use of architectural design processes as a methodological tool for art. In his work, the artist investigates the mythological imagination of ancestral peoples and the re-signification of materials, creating deities and totemic structures that dialogue with the past while projecting possible futures.

His recent solo exhibitions include Dentro do Mato, na Borda do Mar (2019), Orí Tupinambá (2023), and Desperta, ferro!, at Museu de Arte da Bahia (2025).

Spring Bamboo (2024) is part of the series Bambus—which, in turn, is part of the collection dentro do mato, na borda do mar—in which the artist reflects on a residual urban landscape left after human occupation: the green slopes that still dot the city of Salvador, filled with bamboo groves, licuri palms, coconut trees, and oil palms. Ignacio views art as a mechanism for understanding the world, a tool for appropriating his surroundings, whether in their human or geographic-territorial context. He is interested in painting these interstitial urban vegetations, adjusting the lens of his gaze to their different scales and to the explosion of colors and nuances that the tropical sun allows.

In the words of curator Alejandra Muñoz, “The limits of the frames tension something much greater, unattainable, that lies beyond what fits on the painted surface, and the partiality of objects never fully presented. (…) This painting translates a kind of existential nomadism, something that does not easily accept the contingent. It is not a representative, easy, predictable figuration of what pleases. On the contrary, it reveals a necessary nonconformity to keep moving forward.”