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Surreal Collages of Vintage Portraits by Matthieu Bourel

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.

Matthieu Bourel website
via [Dark Silence in Suburbia]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled 'Embroidered Life' that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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