German artist Matthieu Bourel works in collage to create characters and scenes that we’ve never seen before. In his series titled Duplicity Serie, he fractures vintage photographs and arranges them in multiple ways over a single composition; pieces of the image are extracted and expanded, and someone’s face might appear several times in different iterations.
The visually compelling works have elements of surrealism in them. While they’re realistic portraits of people, Bourel has transformed his subjects so that their faces look like masks or puzzle pieces. Each slice of a nose or an eye fits within another similar shape, but they don’t create a clear and coherent portrait. Instead, they are disjointed with a slightly eerie feel.
Bourel writes that he’s interested in the “power of images and their combinations,” and he certainly shows us this in his creative series. By simply replicating aspects of one photograph, you can reveal new and strange qualities.
