One Second After: The Art of Lola Dupre
With a two-headed, dozen-eyed Mona Lisa, a disjointed Frida Kahlo exploding like tiny little pieces of glass, and a tiny Napoleon in Egypt sitting on a gargantuan, long-limbed horse, collage artist and illustrator Lola Dupre proves that there’s art to be done after art is… well… done.
Her disjointed, fragmented collages made with a bevy of carefully placed and creatively repeated layers—where humans gain equine-like features, Kate Moss’s thighs miraculously grow by several (perhaps shocking) inches, and Kim Jong-il smiles from ear to ear while sporting a mile-high afro—have given her growing audience a new look into an often ingrained and familiar reality.
They’ve also made Dupre a stand-out artist who is pushing the boundaries between manipulation, collaboration, and creation.
Her catalogue of work is disorienting, in the best possible way. You can’t just glance and move on, her portraiture requires you to stop and stare, and then stare some more, tracing the unusual outlines of bodies and shapes that tune you into an alternate way of seeing what you already know, from “exploding” John Wilkes Booth and Al Capone portraiture to the black and white, abstract geometric art in Dupre’s Shrapnel series.
Though her collages are intricate and detailed, her tools are simple: Dupre uses paper, scissors, glue, and a steady, experienced hand to create the stunning work on rigid wood panels, a far cry from the more popular digital manipulation in an era of Photoshop. As one of the earliest existing art forms, the collage, ( meaning “to stick” in French) process has remained more or less the same from its inception eons ago—tenth-century Japanese artists added collage work to scrolls, Pablo Picasso and Georges Barque work in cemented collage as an art form and the famed collage work of artists like Kurt Schwitters to Cecil Touchon, founder of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction expanded the genre even further.
Unlike the typical collage wok of combining different images together, however, Dupre concentrates on breathing new life in to just one image through the reconstruction process, retaining glimpses of the images original form and subject despite its distortion.
With her collages appearing on the covers of national magazines like Flaunt and Flair, gallery shows from Spain to California and much praise under her belt, Dupre’s work has become a stand out and sought after medium, combing a delicate balance between commercial and fine art and adding a new, unusually exciting dimension to the long history of collage as an art form.
Her foray into and talent for collage work might come as little surprise given Dupre’s background, which much like her portraiture, is filled with a mishmash of interesting places, people and life experiences.
I think often an artist’s best work can be hidden in their sketchbooks, or scribbled on toilet walls, and sometimes I find the artists pallet more interesting than the painting…”
Born in Algeria, Dupre grew up in Paris, London, and Glasgow, with much of her limited, formal education completed in the confines of several scattered schools. A self-described “hell-raising-know-it-all” in her youth, she spent time traveling across Europe, indulging in a transient lifestyle she seemed well suited for, which came with its own set of eclectic adventures that impacted her collage work later on.
Like the time when, while hitchhiking from Italy to France, she rode along with a cocaine trafficker who liberally sampled his goods while driving, and swerving through picturesque mountains, narrowly avoiding crashing the car several times. Dupre also barely escaped the Swiss bunker of a woman, part-witch, part-survivalist, who was convinced the world was about to end. In Rotterdam, she was chased off by a gang of scooter thugs.
“Perhaps seeing so many places was something like living inside of a morphing collage,” she says.
“All these characters, almost unreal, I still remember their expression and I am sure it must influence my portraiture.”
Throughout her adventures, Dupre dabbled in various forms of art like drawing and animation, working alongside other painters, sculptors, filmmakers and musicians while they shared coffee and the opportunity to discuss technique and art.
It was here, in a fostering, informal environment built on creativity that she really obtained her practical education, setting the groundwork for the development of her collage craft.
“These years had a large impact on my attitude and art, and continue to influence me,” she says. “Having the memory of so many techniques, helps very much not just my art, but also in repairing things and finding solutions to problems.”
Though she first began working exclusively with papier-mache, 2-D patterns increasingly intrigued her. Using the glossy pages of fashion magazines she found perfect for papier-mache, she realized the accidental patterns she was creating in 3-D shapes would work with flatter surfaces, too.
Often on a shoe-string budget, she wasn’t particularly fussy about choosing material, picking up whatever magazines and publications she could find in studios, or for free.
She soon also found that collage-making was a very natural and intuitive process for her, with “every color and texture you could already want existing around us in the print world,” she says.
In their completed state, Dupre’s works look painstakingly intricate, perhaps even complicated, but the process to get them there is fairly simple and straightforward.
After printing an image a suitable number of times on the right kind of paper, Dupre begins building the collage, modifying the image by enlarging or cropping it a number of times depending on the particular idea she’s expanding on. The imagery, while being transformed into a certain, wildly fragmented version of its former self, is not without calculations, as pieces of paper are carefully marked and positioned over a sketch.
If the work changes direction by itself,” Dupre says, “I reflect and most often follow the accidental movement to its natural or surprising conclusion.”
But sometimes even the most rigid of measurements can’t stand in the way of independently spawned paths her work takes while being assembled on to the surfaces she’s working on.
“If the work changes direction by itself,” Dupre says, “I reflect and most often follow the accidental movement to its natural or surprising conclusion.”
The time it takes for her to complete the pieces varies—sometimes a few days, sometimes over a month. When she’s finished, she’s left with a studio overflowing with the remnants of cut patterns and paper, scattered from her desk to the floor.
The most time consuming, intense and detailed pieces she has made so far involved a group of abstract works for an exhibition at CES contemporary in Laguna Beach.
First selling at small exhibitions in Glasgow, which is where her studio was based, her earlier exploding collages and political portraiture attracted attention, and she was soon sending the odd piece to collectors in the U.S. while making sales through her website.
“I think people like to see a portrait where they recognize the subject,” she says. “For a while I wanted to only produce work based on current geopolitical headlines. I still like this idea, to only produce work strictly connected to what the viewer was probably reading about a few days earlier, something really connected to reality, but viewed through warped glass.”
The internet, she says, has opened up an entire new customer and fan base, allowing her to realize that as long as she had an internet connection, she never had to stay in one place.
Now living in southern Spain with her partner, their dog and cat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada after traveling to different villages in Western Europe, she’s drawing a bit of inspiration from the Spanish countryside—from stalking a nearby goat herder who is always on his mobile phone to seeing the symmetry in nearby mountains that look like cartoon hills. This landscape, she says, “will guide the undulating contours of some upcoming abstract work.”
Despite this, she’s not actively looking to be inspired—there are too many ideas, too many projects that she’d like to do swirling around in her head, she says.
“Time is limited so I have to select ideas where and when I can,” she says. “Exposure to life, immediate and distant creates a constant stream of thoughts.”
Unsurprisingly, Dupre’s philosophy encompasses the nature of her work: that great art—much like the juxtaposition and rearrangement she goes through to create something new out of the old—is born largely out of chance.
“I think often an artist’s best work can be hidden in their sketchbooks, or scribbled on toilet walls, and sometimes I find the artists pallet more interesting than the painting,” she says. “I definitely think hard work and practice cannot fail but produce something beautiful in time.”
Having already collaborated with the likes of photographers Lisa Carletta and Dan Monick, what she’s really interested in is partnering up with other artists throughout the creative process, where the wooden panels she’s working on could be passed back and forth between them to fill in to different areas in an attempt to make one larger picture, sort of like a highly sophisticated collage form of the game “telephone.”
After spending time traveling and staying in different villages in Europe last year, Dupre will be based at her home in Southern Spain at least for a year.
From her days traveling in a cocaine-filled car to experimenting with different genres of art, Dupre has cemented herself as a unique frontrunner in the world of collaging, while modernizing and carrying on its legacy into the twenty-first century. Her collages have given new, fresh expressions oozing with emotion to otherwise publicly over saturated faces—from former British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher’s distorted, bullish mug to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s all-knowing gaze—perhaps acting as a mirror for what we think we truly see, or want to see.
She’s currently working with Glasgow-based artist FiST on collaborative work and has upcoming shows in Spain, Portland and at the Los Angeles-based Think Tank Gallery, curated by Dillon Froelich. In between her artistic endeavors, she’s also working with a few commercial clients, too.
Dupre feels incredibly lucky about her successes that have multiplied in recent years.
“I would be making art any way, but it is great to be getting paid for it,” she says.
With a firm grasp on a style that separates her from many of her contemporaries and an openness for improvement and experimentation, Dupre says that often, the will to keep working at a particular craft is more important that inspiration.
“Often when I begin working, I try to do things in an automatic manner,” she says. “I try not to be analytical about things, I think this is more something for the viewer.”
Indeed, where Dupre’s photomontage work is concerned, her honest, and genuine assessment rings true. *
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 28, which is sold out. Support what we do and get our latest issue with a new Hi-fructose subscription here.
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