Digital Collage
Pablo Thecuadro
Pablo Thecuadro arrived at collage through photography, and composition remains the thread running through all his work. Working in fashion imagery for Nike, Vogue, and Burberry, he deconstructs and recombines photographs, treating negative space as a form of withholding—a way of suggesting the guarded parts of a personality. His collages appear in the recent spring print issue of The Grand Tourist, alongside a roundtable between designers Lindsey Adelman and Gabriel Hendifar.
In the Words of the Artist
Digital Collage
I describe my practice as some kind of recycling of images, cutting them so they can have a new life and a new composition. For me, collage is a deeply relaxing process — something I lose myself in completely. There's a particular focus that comes with it, and once I find the composition and begin building the final piece, that's my favorite part of the whole thing.
Digital Collage
What photography gave me, above all, is composition — that's the most important thing I carried with me, and it still sits at the center of how I work. What I had to leave behind is a certain freedom: with a camera, you can shoot anywhere, in motion, on the move. Collage asks the opposite of you. You have to stay still, in one place, and let the work happen there.
The commercial context changes a lot, because the composition depends on what the client wants to show. Sometimes they want the product presented cleanly, with no cutouts, and the collage lives in the background. Other times, they want the product itself drawn into a more abstract composition. What the client needs shapes the work from the start.
Digital Collage
Digital Collage
I still feel the same way — but only when I'm talking about my personal work. That's where the duality lives: who we want to be set against who we really are. With a commission, it's different; the intention comes from somewhere else.
I think it's more of a dispersed, online one. Though it was a talk by Susana Blasco in Zaragoza that first got me interested in collage — so the roots are Spanish, even if what I draw from now is scattered across the internet.
Digital Collage
Digital Collage
About the Artist
Pablo Thecuadro (b. 1992, Zaragoza) is a Spanish photographer and collage artist based in Barcelona. He moved to Madrid to study photography, and it was there, near the end of his degree, that he discovered collage — a technique that has anchored his practice ever since. The shift from camera to cut paper came naturally: composition, he found, was the thread connecting both.
Working across digital and handmade collage, Thecuadro has built a distinctive language within fashion imagery, deconstructing and recombining pictures until they take on new moods and meanings. His work is preoccupied with the layers beneath a surface — the hidden, guarded parts of a personality — and he often uses negative space to suggest what's withheld rather than shown. After five years in Madrid, he relocated to Barcelona, where he continues to work today.
His clients include Nike, Vogue, Burberry, Bershka, and H&M.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
JULIA MALTHA is an analog collage artist based IN Germany. Working primarily with paper, scissors, and vintage magazine scraps, she transforms existing materials into fresh, one-of-a-kind narrative pieces.
A. GUIBERT (Buenos Aires, Argentina) makes hand-cut collages from [source material], part of Argentina's thriving analog collage community.
LAURA THIESSEN creates handmade collages using paper, scissors, a precision knife, and glue in Berkeley, CA. Her primary sources are used vintage magazines and books, with the occasional vintage photograph or ephemera. She loves to revive, reuse, and renew references of the past.
GRACIA THE ARTIST is a Seattle-based multimedia experimentalist working across collage, painting, illustration, photography, and film. Rooted in storytelling, comedy, and collaboration, their hand-cut collage practice draws on artists like Max-o-matic, Anabelle Conde, Ian Woods, and Kate Partington.
NIKO VARTIANEN is a collage artist and editor in Turku, Finland, working with found imagery and vintage ephemera. He edits the zine Cults of Life and Toombes; his work is held in the Kanyer Art Collection.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
How Carrie Schneider Made the World’s Largest Photograph
Schneider’s dazzling contribution to the 2026 Venice Biennale transforms a fleeting moment from a Chris Marker film into a monumental installation.
▼ COLLECT
The Grand Tourist – Issue 2
This linen-wrapped, 384-page issue contains dozens of originally commissioned pictorials and exclusive interviews, including a look at the city of Casablanca, inside the home of Reed Krakoff, the work of leading contemporary dance choreographer Leïla Ka, and a journey on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.
▼ LISTEN
The Soft Machine by Soft Machine.
This 1968 album is the debut from the Canterbury band, blending psychedelic pop with early jazz-rock. Robert Wyatt's drumming and vocals anchor Mike Ratledge's fuzzed-out organ across songs that shift constantly. A foundational record for anyone exploring British psychedelia's stranger corners.
