Filipino designer Eisen Bernard Bernardo joins what seems to be impossible to connect – the modern pop culture with classical art works.
Starting with his project Magazine + Art he inserted magazine covers from popular magazines like Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine and GQ into art works from Da Vinci, Botticelli and Picasso. He creates collages that seem to fit perfectly, as if Keira Knightly was really “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the famous painting of Vermeer – just with a cigarette in her mouth.
After the success of his first series, he recently used album covers of well-known musicians, from David Bowie to Rihanna and Lady Gaga, and combined them with famous art works, calling this series Album + Art.
When he sees an album cover he instantly has a work from a historic artist in his head, sometimes it takes him only one hour to create the collage because of that, although sometimes, several days, as searching through thousands of paintings and adjusting them the right way can take some time. Why the art works seem to fit so well, is not a miracle for the graphic designer. He thinks that a good cover arrangement is always inspired by classical art, as remarkable similarities and references show. “I think the principles of photography are the same as classical painting. Portraiture using cameras adopted the same set of rules and techniques in painting.”, explains the artist.
But what is the purpose of mixing these two worlds together? Some people see it as a way of making aware of the objectifying of women; others just see it as something funny. But maybe it is just to point out how similar today’s modern culture still is to the past. “People say that in today’s celebrity culture popstars are what muses were once for the great painters: Inspiration”, Bernardo states.
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