Cubomania

R(apture)In recent days I was meant to enter Illustrators Australia’s annual 9x5 exhibition. In emulation of nineteenth century artists who painted on cigar boxes, each year every member is given a piece of plywood to paint, draw on, or otherwise decorate.

This year’s theme was ‘Rapture’. Now that had me flummoxed for quite a while, and by the time I thought of a concept to do with fireworks (to execute in paint and collage), I had simply run out of time.

During research for the third issue of the IA magazine Outline, I discovered the Surrealist method of collage making called ‘cubomania’, where an image is dissected into squares, then mixed up and reassembled. It’s a bit like one of those sliding tile games I had when I was a child. (There are some rather cool ones out there if you do a Google image search – here’s an amusing one to read about.)

So I thought I’d whip together one of those according to the 9x5 theme. I ended up doing two, which you can see here, with the missing square a letter from the word. Fortuitously there are exactly seven rows, just enough to spell out the word ‘rapture’ (if I was mad enough to chop up seven images and bore you with them). I’ve included the originals, one a perfume ad for Gucci Guilty, and the other for Moët & Chandon, featuring Scarlet Johansson. 

(r)A(pture)

CUBOMANIA UNCUT