THESKINNYTYPE

TheSkinnyType explores the complex nature of desire through a voyeuristic lens. With incredibly careful attention to lighting and perspective, many of his works, upon first glance, appear to be single photographs. His collaged creations seamlessly blend reality with imagination, effectively capturing the unique essence of both individuality and longing in a visually surrealistic narrative.

For me collage is a tool to play, to realise fantasies, to create idillic scenarios by forcing images together, to trick the eye and confuse the observer, to create scenarios that appear real at the first glance but that by a careful look are not quite right, to force the observer to discover where the cuts are, to question what they are seeing, whether it is real or not.

TheSkinnyType

TheSkinnyType works are focused primarily on hand-cut photographic collages that create idyllic scenarios of young love and intimacy that delicately float between idealism and naturalism and play with different representations of the male figure. These scenes are explored from the dreams and fantasies of an observer who is driven either by the desire of realising impossible scenarios of narcissistic love, or looking for intimate moments created from characters and situations that share nothing in common other that the desire to unite two or more figures together.

These sensual interactions between one guy and himself and the desire to observe these interactions from a voyeuristic perspective are a constant theme throughout TheSkinnyType’s work and form the foundation to his ongoing series ‘Narcissus Dreams’. Carefully selecting his images from magazines and books of photographers that he loves, TheSkinnyType cuts, arranges and glues his pieces by hand to create realistic compositions that are simultaneously tinged with the idealism of a renaissance painting; youthful muscular figures, representing their sinuosity to perfection with a clarity of line and delicate use of light and colour.

Crucial to TheSkinnyType’s practice is the nondigital process and the constraints that analogue imposes on us. For TheSkinnyType, being constrained by the physicality and rigidness of the raw material adds to the excitement when two different images are combined to generate a new story or composition - no image is manipulated, scaled, mirrored or filtered. In his unprecedented ability to merge each image with such precision and charm, one likens his work to the traditions of classical sculpture, the history of painting of past centuries, as well as to modernist art movements such as Impressionism.

Courtesy of TheSkinnyType

The Skinny Type was born in 1979 in Manizales, Colombia. He is currently based in London, England.