Collage on Paper
11 x 8 in
Ivan Barrera
Ivan Barrera makes collages that withhold as much as they show: colored circles cover faces, single words name what the image won't, found bodies sit in compositions of stillness. Working in a Baldessari-esque style, he reassembles clippings and found symbols to pull questions of identity, queerness, and the male body out of their fixed frames. The erotic charge is deliberate — a body returned to tenderness, felt rather than consumed.
In the Words of the Artist
Collage on paper
11 x 8 in
Collage is one of my central languages. Through it, I learn to look at the world in fragments, and it is precisely within those fragments that the experience of inhabiting it takes shape. Clippings, found images, collective symbols torn from their original context: with these, I articulate compositions that examine narratives of identity, accelerated time, and an inevitable sense of nostalgia.
The erotic in my work is deeply personal — a sublimation of my own experience of intimacy and connection. And perhaps it is also a response to the constant exploitation of sex and bodies in advertising and media. When desire is used to sell, tenderness disappears. I'm interested in recovering that — in showing the male form as something felt rather than consumed.
Collage on paper
11 x 8 in
Collage, to me, is a way of seeing — and of constructing — reality. Human experience itself is made of fragments: some hidden, some overexposed, all of them shaping who we are or revealing what we're still trying to understand about ourselves. In that sense, collage is a metaphor for the experience of building oneself. We are never a finished image. We are always in the process of being assembled.
There is a tension in my work in the questioning of hegemonic values and fixed notions of identity — what gets imposed, what gets accepted without question. And alongside that, a persistent interest in absence: what is hidden, what is left out, what the image deliberately withholds. I find that the things not shown often carry as much meaning as the things that are.
Collage on paper
11 x 8 in
Collage on paper
8 x 8 in
Living outside the norm — or simply lacking the privileges that come with it — gives you the ability to observe and experience the world from other vantage points. It forces you to imagine, to create the things that make resistance and existence possible. In that sense, my identity hasn't just shaped what I allow myself to make. It has made making necessary.
Collage on paper
11 x 8 in
I wouldn't claim to carry the weight of deconstructing masculinity — that feels too large a task for any single body of work. But I do hope mine creates space for questioning. At the very least, I want the male form in my work to be felt rather than consumed — which in itself is already a small act of resistance against the versions of masculinity we're handed.
Collage on paper
8 x 9 in
About the Artist
Iván Barrera is a visual artist whose practice encompasses collage, painting, and drawing techniques through which he interweaves urban aesthetics, pop nostalgia, queer experience, and an intimate eroticism. With a background in visual communication and experience in editorial design and fashion, Barrera has developed a self-taught approach to the plastic arts.
Collage stands as a central axis of his production: it operates as a metaphor for constructed identities, questioning fixed conceptions of Mexicanidad and addressing themes of masculinity, the body, and representation through a queer lens. His work proposes alternative readings of Mexican identity, queerness, and other hegemonic values imposed within a context of ongoing cultural transformation.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
CHRISTINA FASTENAU works in paint and analog collage, cutting and recombining found imagery into figures that feel both familiar and dislocated.
YASSI is a collage artist and musician who cuts apart images of herself and reassembles the fragments into something new, strange, and wholly her own.
RICHARD HAWKINS (b. 1961, Texas) is a Los Angeles–based artist known for collage, painting, and appropriation. His figurative, often queer work draws on fashion, horror, and literary sources.
JONAH REENDERS is an artist interested in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. His perspective is shaped by a nuanced understanding of scientific observation, identity, and connection.
108 (GUIDO BISAGNI) was born in Alessandria in 1978. A leading exponent of Post-graffitism and neo-minimal abstractism in Italy, he began with traditional graffiti before evolving his forms and themes, becoming among the first to use numbers as a name.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
25 Photobooks That Define America
From classics to contemporary standouts, these volumes illuminate the paradoxes and possibilities of life in the United States.
▼ READ
Foam Talent Studio Visit: Chen Yiding
In Yiding’s studio in Shanghai, images do not remain fixed for long. They are pinned to the wall, cut apart, reframed, folded into relief, or brought into contact with ordinary objects that alter how they are read.
▼ LISTEN
LIFE & DEATH by Chris Burnett
Burnett's two-track single runs a tight 6:49. "LIFE" (3:11) and "DEATH" (3:37) sit side by side, the split-face cover mirroring the pairing, while a chopped-and-screwed vocal threads them together.
