Mario Zoots: Collages to Altere the Existence

By Sybaris Collection

Collage is perhaps one of the most powerfull techniques left by the avant-gard art from the earlier 20th Century. With over more than a century watching how collages are capable to change our way of seeing and how thounsand of artist has been used it, Mario Zoots is proposing a different perspective from his work.

Mario Zoots is a contemporary Denver-based artists working mainly with found images from different sources suchs as classic film stills, vintage postcards, found family photographs and his own photography. His work is closely related with archive practices, he saves thounsands of images from different stiles and times, which endend up being kind of an archive of the world’s imaginary. We can imagine his artistic proccess as that of a treasure hunter but also as that of an art researcher trying to find out the relationship between the images made over the years.

In The Secret Knowledge, David Hockney investigate the painting techniques of the old master by contrasting and comparing different artworks from the Renaissance but also with his paintings. Something in the work of Zoots remembers the methodology used by Hockney. However, the different the former and the later is that Zoots juxtaposes images from different background to create new points of view from the existing ones. In both cases, the interest thing is how images can be used to understand and create new ways of seeing the world.

Zoots have said that: “I would like to think that my work is about tapping into the unconscious and setting up parameters to allow chance to work its magic.” At the end of the day, this is how our memory works: what we see and think through images provoke our memory to find out in the deepness our memories related to that o differente images, so we can have an specific thinking.

By adjusting, inverting, and slicing separate pictures together to create new works of art, Zoots explores the subversive force of found images. He is engaged in the excavation, reimagination and manipulation of contemporary culture, his vision is both playful and disturbing. His strange sensibility questions reality and challenges assumptions about the way things are.