Category: collage

Michael Pajon

The Collage Artwork of Michael Pajon

Michael Pajon, born in 1979 in Chicago, currently lives and works in New Orleans. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, Pajon worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick.

During this time, Pajon started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana. Pajon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

“These maps, postcards, children’s book illustrations, matchbooks, sheet music, and calling cards are the guts and gristle of common things people collected over a life, spared the fate of being buried in the rubble and shadows of once prosperous towns. This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic.” – Michael Pajon

Carmine Santaniello

Carmine Santaniello, “Amore”, Lithograph, 9 x 12 Inches

Collage is an integral part of New York City-based Carmine Santaniello’s art and is usually the starting point for each work. Employing the traditional method of cut and glued paper, he creates new faces out of amassed facial images. He incorporates elements of his own photographs of exterior environments such as graffiti or street art. Some works remain as collage, some become drawings, some artist books or articulated paper dolls, but most become monoprints utilizing lithography.

Through the juxtaposition of techniques and mediums, he creates evocatively charged works of art. These new works have an erotic edge with a voyeuristic feel to them. Each subject is confined behind a the vale of marred graffiti-like images.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://carminesantaniellofineart.blogspot.com    and   https://www.etsy.com/in-en/listing/585432108/original-art-monoprint-lithograph-gay

Being and Nothingness

Artist Unknown, “Embrace Nothingness”, Collage, Noirgraph

“From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.” –

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Image reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: https://noirgraph.tumblr.com

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Casino la Colle”, November 1955, Oil on Canvas Collage on Canvas, 23 x 28 Inches, Private Collection

Jean Dubuffet was an integral French artist known for his primal paintings and sculptures of vernacular subjects. His adoption of the term Art Brut or raw art, referred to the art of children, prisoners, and the mentally ill, was a reaction to what he called art culturel or refined art. It was his desire to break from tradition by implementing rudimentary mark making and emulsions made from sand, tar, and trash.

“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person’s being. It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.” – Jean Dubuffet

Adam Collier Noel

Adam Collier Noel, “ Hunting the Hart (For Frida)”, Collage, Painting

“The “For Frida” series utilizes paper ephemera consisting of receipts, handwritten letters, playing cards, blue prints, etc. as a way of constructing my own nostalgic portraits. A silhouette is then transferred over the collage leaving revealing a figurative window of my found object composition. The black squares act as the framework for a void or missing part of the individual.            – Adam Collier Noel

Image reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: http://adamcolliernoel.tumblr.com

José Naranja

José Naranja: Sketchbooks

José Naranja beautifully detailed sketchbooks by collaging elements of photography, writing, stamps, and his own precise drawings of everything from poison mushrooms to a bird’s eye view of his dream studio. The ex-aeronautic engineer began working with sketchbooks after he discovered pocket-size Moleskine notebooks in 2005 and realized they were the perfect vessel to document his daily experiences and develop his wildest ideas. After 13 years of using the same style of notebook, Naranja now crafts his own by hand.

“It creates a special link between my journals and me. Drawings of calligraphy are just useful tools to express ideas They are the visible layer in the whole notebook as a piece, a mandala, and it’s the final artwork. Every detail in the process should be taken into consideration because I give the best effort. At the moment they have given me back only good news.”- José Naranja

The sketchbook artist also sells edited copies of his best work in a compilation called “The Orange Manuscript”, which you can find on his website.

Tadanori Yokoo

Illlustration by Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo’s work, while highly successful commercially, is deeply personal. Employing his own themes, pictures, and references to himself and his anti-modernist collage style, his approach is instantly recognizable and individual. He has said that he learned in the late 1960s “to escape from compromise when designing by linking my creations directly to my lifestyle.”

Yokoo’s work crosses the border between design and fine art. Seemingly devoid of limitations or rules, his paintings are warm, autobiographical, and mystical and draw on a variety of seemingly incongruous influences such as spiritualism, Japanese aesthetics, the psychedelic posters of the ’60s, science fiction, and comic art. It also consciously draws on Ukiyo-e, or “the art of the floating world,” whose themes express the impermanence of life.

Several motifs recur in Yokoo’s work. His fascination with waterfalls borders on obsession. In 1999, in a group exhibition titled “Ground Zero Japan” at the Mito Museum of Art, Yokoo filled an entire room from floor to ceiling with postcards of waterfalls which were reflected in a black mirrored floor. Other exhibitions on the subject include “Craze for Waterfalls” at the Kirin Art Space Harajuku and “Tadanori Yokoo’s Magical Make a Pilgrimage Round” exhibition. In 1992, Absolut Vodka commissioned him to design an advertisement titled Absolut Yokoo featuring twenty-five of his waterfall paintings.

Yokoo is also known for his science-fiction posters and Ken Takakura gangster-film posters, and his designs have been used for theater sets in Japan and Italy.

David Hockney

David Hockney, “Pearblossom Hwy. 11- 18th April 1986, #2″, Chromogenic Print, J. Paul Getty Museum

“Pearblossom Highway (the painting) shows a crossroads in a very wide open space, which you only get a sense of in the western United States… . [The] picture was not just about a crossroads, but about us driving around. I’d had three days of driving and being the passenger. The driver and the passenger see the road in different ways. When you drive you read all the road signs, but when you’re the passenger, you don’t, you can decide to look where you want. And the picture dealt with that: on the right-hand side of the road it’s as if you’re the driver, reading traffic signs to tell you what to do and so on, and on the left-hand side it’s as if you’re a passenger going along the road more slowly, looking all around. So the picture is about driving without the car being in it.”     – David Hockney

Thus David Hockney described the circumstances leading to the creation of this photocollage of the scenic Pearblossom Highway north of Los Angeles. His detailed collage reveals the more mundane observations of a road trip. The littered cans and bottles and the meandering line where the pavement ends and the sand begins point to the interruption of the desert landscape by the roads cutting through it and the imprint of careless travelers.

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni, “The Charge of the Lancers”, 1915, Collage, Tempera Paint, Cardboard, 50 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Umberto Boccioni was one of the lead artists in the Italian Futurist movement of the early 1900s.  His most famous works are in bronze, where the energy of his forms are represented by a solid trail following a figure.  In “The Charge of the Lancers”, Boccioni depicts a fierce cavalry trampling soldiers with bayonets. The forceful power of this image is an excellent visual representation of the ideas of the futurists.

The “Charge of the Lancers” is the only known work by Boccioni that is devoted exclusively to the theme of war. Being a collage, Charge was also a rare departure for the artist in terms of medium. In previous works, Boccioni had used the figure of the horse as a symbol for work, but in this collage the horse becomes a symbol of war and natural strength, since it appears to be overcoming a horde of German bayonets.

If, in fact, Boccioni was establishing the brute strength of the horse over man-made weapons, it would suggest a slight departure from the Futurist principles of Marinetti. This work also eerily prefigures Boccioni’s own death from having been trampled by a horse.

Futurism was founded by the writer Filipo Tommaso Marinetti, and was joined by a handful of young artists, including Umberto Boccioni at the forefront. Based on Marinetti’s radical manifesto of 1909, Futurism was an extremely fast paced and modern movement.

Kelly Moore

Kelly Moore, “Dead Cowboy Retablo”

Kelly Moore is a self-taught artist who has no formal training or education in art. His original and expressionist work has been referred to as Outsider Art, Art Brut, Raw Art and Visionary Art. His intuitive style and technique reflects a raw, primitive quality that is frequently juxtaposed with a startling innocence. He is currently living and working in New Mexico.

Matthieu Bourel

Matthieu Bourel, “Education / Formatting”, 2016, Animated Version

Matthieu Bourel is a German collage and digital artist whose work veers uneasily from nostalgia to technological dystopia. Bourel combines traditional cut and paste collage techniques with digital editing, digital animation, and even sound design to create a body of work that blurs the distinction between illustration, graphic design and art installation.

Bourel describes his work as “data-ism” and the reference to the original Dada movement of the early twentieth century is more than a play on words. Like his Dadaist precursors, Bourel delights in creating shocking juxtapositions, ironic distance and high-brow/low-brow mash-ups.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, Untitled, Collage and Mixed Media on Canvas, 1960, 138 x 172 cm

Marca-Relli is considered one of the main exponents of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, and he was involved in the movement from its conception as he organized the first Abstract Expressionist show at the Ninth Street Show in 1951, with the artist Franz Kline and the gallerist Leo Castelli.

This important exhibition marked the beginning of the new uniquely American artistic movement, which is based on revolutionary painting methods, notably, Action Painting.  Artists that participated in this exhibition included: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Barnet Newman, Hans Hoffman, Franz Klien and Conrad Marca-Relli.