Marco Laborda's collages, a game of (de)construction

Marco Laborda, an artist born in Barcelona, plays with photographs to reconstruct a new reality. He thus transforms portraits into colourful collages, creating spaces open to the imagination.

“After years of working on computers, I found a way to reconnect with my childhood: to play and create,”

Marco Laborda says. The Catalan artist collaborated with two photographers, Vincent Urbani and Carlos Villarejo, to create his collages. “It was through collage that I began to pay much more attention to photography,” he says. He browses magazines, the photographs of his collaborators, in search of portraits and glances that captivates him. At the same time, he creates, in his head, colorful spaces, and reconstructs the elements that he has previously cut. His work becomes a game of (de)construction. The object of his fascination? The human. “Perhaps the object that fascinates me the most is the human being, with all its complexity, its idiocy, its fears and its dreams.” With his collages, he seeks a “way to stop time and capture the human soul.” By observing his creations, these decomposed figures, these colored spaces are highlighted. Thus building a new reality, composed of existing images. Intuitively – this is how he describes his work – Marco Laborda proposes an approach between decomposition and reconstruction. And then “there is a moment when I stop and stop looking, as if I arrived at a good port”. An image, like a story, is never finished.

A being in motion

When Marco Laborda talks about his work, he refers to a dance, a “being in movement”. The artist’s career path bears is a testimony of this: the son of a painter, who grew up surrounded by art, he studied drama, worked in film and advertising before devoting himself to the visual arts. “I am a being in motion, experiences have changed me internally and externally,” the artist tells us. Marco Laborda, like his collages, is himself under construction, a being in search of new means of expression. “I like to think that, like collages, we are all made up of the remains of other people: our parents, our grandparents and all those who have influenced our lives and our way of being.” Collages are like their creator, but also like any human being, in permanent construction. Everything in our lives is in motion. Marco Laborda sums up the essence of his work in this way: “I would like to think that these collages convey the complexity of a human being. The edges, the emptiness, the constant movement we experience. In the end, we live in a state of constant alteration, which I feel within myself. Today I am no longer the same as yesterday, I am evolving and I am involutive in other cases. The collage holds this particularity: you can play with the faces and modify them. That is why I like to create incomplete figures, under construction.” In the end, like a human being,” a work of art is never finished, it simply stops at interesting places”.