La Mirada Oblicua is a project with a profound emotional background. It is an illustrated book, in the form of a deck of cards, which narrates in a fragmented and dreamy tone a personal process:

“And this is the story of how I learned to regain light after a chronic illness blinded my retinas and how illustration became medicine and refuge.” – José Luis Merino, illustrator, and visual artist.

Merino shares with us the process of overcoming the grief that the eye disease brought upon him, being a visual artist. The consequences that this event caused in his daily, work, and emotional life, some of them permanent, are the ones these images helped alleviate.

The project is driven by the illustrator José Luis Merino together with the vision of the creative director Iñigo Jerez and the design by Extra Estudio. The team has done an exceptional job finding a way to materialize this narrative into an extraordinary product, a book that doesn’t look like a book, a deck without apparent utility.

The deck consists of 40 illustrated playing cards printed in four-color process and one Pantone, accompanied by a booklet that narrates the different moments of this grieving process in a more colloquial manner. The set is contained within a box made of Sirio Color Turchese paper from Fedrigoni Paper with gold stamping and embossing.