Playfully distorting proportion and cultural context, Belgian artist ’s work comprises surreal collages and illustrations that somewhat unexpectedly combine vintage with contemporary images. Slabbinck likes to play around with different styles and proportions with the aim of creating powerful yet simple visual works that are permeated by a subtle sense of humour. His carefully composed images create startling juxtapositions and present new meanings through a masterful combination of completely heterogeneous elements and a clever use of scale and form. An avid collector of magazines and books from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, the artist takes full advantage of the muted tones and rich textures that he finds in his source material, namely vintage advertisements, photography and print.

”Mid-century advertisements have a certain look that appeals even up to this day. There is a sense of innocence in them that’s very inviting to work with. Putting these images out of their normal frame and juxtaposing them with modern elements can give an exciting and surprising effect. The characters in these ads can function as actors in the collage, and I, as the director, can give them a second life by putting them in a new surreal landscape.”
-Sammy Slabbinck

Analysis

In this photo there is a young boy who looks as if he was initially playing with toys. The background is of a large mountain range with an overcast sky, the clouds touching the tips. The boy is holding what appears to be a toy brick and he is playing on the ruins of an Aztec village. The texture in this photo is rough with the collapsed building and rocky mountains but contrasts with the soft nature and purity of the young child. The significance of the boy and the brick is that it as if he is rebuilding the damaged houses whilst playing this symbolizes how important playing is for kids and how it constructs ideas and imagination. There is contrast between the simplistic boy and the sublime nature behind him, it also closes the barrier of age and merges old ruins with young innocence. It suggests that the young are important as they are going to build our future, when we all die they will still be here to carry on constructing the world we created. Sammy has clearly cropped the boy and placed him in the middle ground between the other two pictures. Even though in a literal sense the scale of this picture is impossible, metaphorically it represents the idea that we underestimate children and their presents, they might not be the size of a mountain but they hold similar qualities of strength and power. On the other hand I feel like this picture holds a negative stereotype of men and how they aren’t good for anything other than building. This empathizes how this idea of men going out to work and women staying at home is drilled into the minds of kids from such young ages that it becomes natural to them and the cycle continues for yet another generation.

My Final Outcome

I was influenced by Sammy Slabbink to create this final piece. I took a picture of my little brother and an older picture of my when I visited the Pyrenees. My first step in Photoshop was select, select and mask, then I used the quick selection tool to  roughly highlight the area of my brother I wanted to isolate from the background. Next I used the  eraser tool to get rid of any unwanted parts in more detail. I opened the picture of the mountains, decreased its brightness, offset and exposure. Finally I placed my brother onto my mountain picture and blurred out his legs to make it look like he is sitting in the snow. I wanted to create something that had connotations similar to the ones I expressed above about young children being underestimated just because of their size.  He is wearing shorts to represent the fact that children aren’t always weak, they hold power in society, they are our future and like my brother they don’t feel the cold, they are stronger than we think. As well as that the ice cream made from the snow represents that the youth are resourceful, before all the technology they play with anything; mud, pot, pans, we could learn a few life lessons from kids as they get the best out of the things they have, they work with what they have. I purposely made an unrealistic scale between the mountains and my brother to suggest that mountains may be big in real life but they don’t hold anymore importance than children just because of their size.