![]() ![]() Through two years of full-time freelancing, he’s managed to stay true to his style, a Caribbean offshoot of R. Last year, he transformed walls during the popular Santurce es Ley festival and the inaugural Humacao Grita. ![]() And mural work, which Vazquez first got into with the collective El CoCa, where he continues to contribute, is coming up more often. Vazquez is part of the thriving community of independent illustrators and artists on the island too, showing at expos (including last fall’s Hijack!, a virtual takeover of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico) as well as tabling at comics and arts festivals, both locally and outside the island. He’s a go-to collaborator for Puerto Rico’s underground music scene, from punk bands to indie fests like Bronson, even capturing a typical night at its mainstay DIY venue, El Local. It wasn’t Vazquez’s first time illustrating for musicians. “More people like my style right now because Bad Bunny made it OK to have that style.” He started talking about the concert, and we were tossing around ideas for that, so the meeting took off from there.” “We started the meeting around 10 at night and stayed until about 4 a.m. I’m like, ‘That’s my notebook,’” Vazquez laughs. This is where the idea with the eye on black came out, because he saw my notebook he said he’d been thinking of something like that, an eye on a black background. He sits down next to me, we start talking and going through ideas. Bad Bunny attends the 2018 American Music Awards at Microsoft Theater on Octoin Los Angeles, California. Bad Bunny, who arrived with friends via golf cart, immediately took to the visual. He’d even drawn one on his portfolio: just a sketch in liquid paper on its black background. Vazquez has long been integrating the third eye element into his signature, peeled-apart faces with bulging eyeballs the overall feeling is a literal representation of a mind-melting, out-of-body experience. He found this out in person when he met the rapper in the Dominican Republic – at some upscale villas in nearby La Romana, he says – to discuss album artwork plans. That’s when everything around the third eye exploded.”Īs it turns out, Bad Bunny had seen Vazquez’s work even before Buena Vibra’s suggestion. So I did a sketch, and then they asked to include Bad Bunny’s face, and on that draft, that’s where the third eye was really born. ![]() “They wanted to bring in pinball machines, but they didn’t want to get too into that yet, so what they wanted was an intro to pinball machines in my style. “In that moment, it was super ambiguous,” Vazquez says of the direction given to him by Buena Vibra, the Puerto Rican creative agency commissioned by Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny concert poster by Sergio Vazquez. It was at last fall’s American Music Awards that Benito was widely recognized for sporting the eye, fixed onto his forehead at the pre-show red carpet and onstage during the performance of Cardi B’s “I Like It” alongside J Balvin.īut the third eye was first incorporated into the Bad Bunny aesthetic through the San Juan concert poster, where Vazquez brought the eye into the colorful and fiery mix of arrows and pathways swirling around the rapper’s image. But maybe more surprising for Vazquez is that, in the process, he inadvertently inspired Benito to adopt what’s become an integral part of his persona: the third eye. It had been a pre-planned test – one which Vazquez passed – for gaining entry to the next stage. When Puerto Rican artist Sergio Vazquez was commissioned to create the concert poster for Bad Bunny’s much-anticipated March 2019 homecoming, he had no idea he’d eventually create the cover for his landmark debut album, X100PRE. ![]()
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