Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!: Noel Herrera at Patient Info

Noel Herrera’s multilayered creative practice and daily routines are inextricably linked.Herrera builds elaborate worlds where scenes from everyday life, maximalist daydreams, pop-culture influences, and masterful, non-linear storytelling converge. His imaginative marker drawings are defined by saturated color, seamless lines, and cartoonish settings—stage-like interiors, flattened landscapes, or crisp white backgrounds—populated by tributes to his most revered interests.

Modest in scale, Herrera’s vivid works are playful yet ordered, sincere yet tinged with sly humor. He draws without hesitation from memory, moving with effortless accuracy and continuity from one image to the next. Diverse, ongoing series—iconic fast foods, doors(as portals), Thomas & Friends tank engines, brand logos, or characters transcribed from favorite TV shows—often appear to lead into or out of one another, as if each drawing represents a single cell in an extensive yet elusive storyboard. His process is part recollection, part invention—exhaustive in its earnest observation and exploration of subjects, centered in repetition and encyclopedic curiosity.

Herrera’s process is instinctual, driven not just by the desire to create, but to recall and document what’s important. Over hundreds of drawings, a complex network of narratives, personal experience, and imagery evolves and subtly overlaps, proposing endless possibilities and unexpected relationships between his chosen subjects.McDonald’s storefronts, logos, and menu items are faithfully (and repeatedly) recreated. Vignettes of drive-thrus or restaurant interiors appear through distinctive doorways. A McDonald’s themed tank engine is inserted into the Thomas & Friends universe. Herrera’s body of work suggests a kind of labyrinthine memory palace or highly personal archive, constantly expanding as his interests shift. Within this enigmatic taxonomy, recurring symbols—golden arches, red hearts, his own smiling avatar—serve as emotional and visual lodestars.

Herrera’s approach to art-making remains fearless, as he continues to take risks in his most recent works. In the studio, he frequently pivots between the material and digital, carefully searching for and manipulating source imagery on an iPad, then manually adding details to intentionally designed inkjet prints. Flat, hand-drawn likenesses are increasingly replaced by their digital counterparts—packaged Pokémon toys, diminutive tank engines, Large Fries, healthy stacks of hundred-dollar bills, Herrera’s out stretched left hand. Billowy white clouds transform into gigantic thought bubbles containing pepperoni pizzas and cases of coca-cola. Quickly scrawled text appears often, ranging from descriptive notations to imagined fast food receipts. Familiar characters are now cleverly depicted as subjects of artworks within artworks and DVD designs for Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of the Noel Herrera Show are introduced.

Noel Herrera (b.1999) is a Chicago-based artist who has maintained a studio practice at Arts of Life’s West Town location since 2021. Herrera’s amusing marker drawings are direct extensions of his everyday life and interests – playful tributes to favorite foods, restaurants, tv shows, toys, etc. His process is defined by fast-paced, intuitive precision. Herrera employs a deceptively simple aesthetic, boasting bright colors, boldly outlined objects and characters, and a heightened sense of order. In the studio he is prolific, focused, and imaginative. Herrera’s work has been featured in More Drawings About Buildings and Food at Western Exhibitions, Jesse at Circle Contemporary, The Super Secret Supper Club at VSG, Today is the Greatest at NIAD in Richmond, California, and Cordially Invited V at Make Studio in Baltimore, among other exhibitions.