“The Garden” and “Moons” are two new collage series from Berlin-based, Portuguese artist and illustrator Luis Dourado that attempt to deconstruct natural elements and re-build them into hypnotic new configurations. From the small scale of petals and leaves to the big scale of the moon, both series successfully manage to distort reality in visually captivating and thought-provoking ways. Although the two series are quite distinct in subject matter and mood, they were both conceived when the artist came across a certain book. In the case of “The Garden”, it was an old book about domestic gardening, found in a give-away box while Dourado was walking home in Berlin. The book provided both the inspiration and the source material, as its illustrated pages were carefully sliced and then physically used for the collages. (…) “The Garden” (2016) uses close-up images of flowers and plants with distinct shapes and strong saturation. By merging different types together, both complementary and contrasting, the collages create mesmerising images alluding to strange new types of flora. As Dourado says, it’s “a two dimensional dialogue between slices of images” resulting in “a weird visual experience”. Composition-wise, the idea of a labyrinth, which the artist often uses in his work, both brings out the plants’ natural maze-like morphology and evokes, as the work titles suggest, “a maze of memories, dreams and illusions”.”

Article by Eric David for Yatzer

Photography analogue manipulation, 2016