Chema Méndez (mendezmendez) is a digital collage artist based in Spain, creating mixed digital media works since 2009. His practice merges historical paintings with modern source material to form surreal compositions and relatable works that tap into the human experience. Over time mendezmendez has developed a distinctive approach that blends precision with imagination.
For many years, he approached his work with meticulous perfectionism, often dedicating weeks to a single piece. In early 2024, however, he shifted toward a daily creation practice, embracing fluidity and experimentation. His process now unfolds with minimal overthinking, drawing from a wide range of sources; public domain paintings and illustrations, photography, 3D renders, AI, and his own sketches.
mendezmendez has continuously evolved his practice while remaining rooted in a philosophy of consistency and curiosity. For him, the creative process itself is the most enduring source of inspiration: showing up daily, trying something new, and trusting that each work, whether refined or imperfect, moves him closer to the art he is meant to create.
First Impressions connects Impressionism to digital animation. Pointillist textures meet Muybridge’s motion studies, forming loops that reimagine 19th-century experiments with light, color, and time. These works reflect how new technologies - from paint tubes, to camera shutters, and pixels - reshape both human perception, and thus, artistic practice.
This series grows from over a decade of mendezmendez's ongoing collage practice: remixing history, focusing on perception and the everyday. The animations are simple on the surface, yet rooted in defiance and experimentation; they form a dialogue across centuries between artists who sought to capture the fleeting, and his own search for a digital language that continues their work.
The title encapsulates many aspects of this series: my first body of work sourcing from the Impressionist movement, my first animated series, and the first time I release a large amount of artworks at once. I also love word play in my titles so this seemed perfect.
I dove deep into the Impressionist movement and the era during which it came about. During the 19th century, the industrial revolution and advances in technology made the movement physically possible, while also prompting the Impressionists to respond to a changing, shifting world around them - one informed as much by scientific advancements, as by societal ones (these of course tend to be very much related). The invention of metal paint tubes allowed artists to take their easels outdoors and paint everyday life en plein air; new paintbrush ferrules facilitated techniques like pointillism; and the established art world dismissed the movement outright. I see many parallels between this and the rise of digital art today
I researched the lives and achievements of individual artists, and quickly became enamoured of neo-Impressionists George Seurat and Paul Signac. They worked together to develop pointillism, a technique that fools the eye by blending color optically using dots of different colors instead of blending pigment, not unlike pixels.
In their work I found vast areas of skies, fields, ocean shores, and plants: the material I sourced to texture motion loops and sequence into my animations.
When I came across the work of Eadweard Muybridge, I found the subject matter I wanted to animate. Muybridge was a contemporary of the Impressionist movement, who thanks to advances in photographic technology innovated a new form of stopping movement: his motion studies revealed to the human eye the previously “invisible” forms made by moving figures.
Signac and Seurat distilled light and color, Muybridge distilled movement and time; the legacy of their experiments continues to be influential today. I am always interested in bringing different parts together to form a new whole. Combining these two elements, I uncovered a new form of animation, one which I believe is a departure and a development from my known artistic practice
Antibes, the Pink Cloud by Paul Signac / The Channel at Gravelines, Evening by Georges Seurat
This collection grew out of your daily project The Present but feels like a big shift. Can you share more about how it originated?
About a year into The Present - my daily project in which I create a digital collage artwork every day - I was browsing some art archives and found a beautiful painting by Alexander Kanoldt Morgensonne (Morning Sun) from 1907: a beautiful, soft pointillist landscape painting. I used it to create a collage of a human silhouette in a vast pointillist sky. I was so hooked on the aesthetics of the piece that I felt the urge to explore it further. I had been interested in creating an animated collage for a while, so this seemed like a great way to combine both. I filmed my own hand opening and closing, I cut out the hand, looped a sequence of it, and textured it with the same painting. This became the first piece I made in the series, “Reflex”. From that moment on, I knew this would become a new body of work, and I also started to incorporate it into my daily practice.
This body of work marks a stylistic departure from your well-known digital collages. How do you see it as a continuation of your artistic journey, and where does it diverge?
In the same way that introducing AI to my workflow allowed me to explore new ways of expressing myself after 15 years of digital collage-making, I see this style of new impressionist animation as a departure which serves to expand my oeuvre.
In terms of subject and meaning, I have always looked to earlier artistic periods or movements - Old Masters, Surrealism - as sources that I remix, update, and incorporate into my digital collage compositions, so my focus on Impressionism here may be visually different, but conceptually the same. The concept of time - of stopping it, of distilling it into a single frame like Muybridge, and thereby uncovering something fundamental to human experience - is absolutely in line with my daily practice, from a chronological and conceptual standpoint, since my daily practice uncovers my own unconscious, and tends towards themes related to human interiority and imagination.
Impressionism clearly plays a role, were there any expected and unexpected influences (artistic, cultural, personal) that shaped this collection?
Beyond the aesthetic and scientific qualities that caught my attention, the most unexpected fact of the movement is how its development parallels that of digital art in terms of new technologies allowing for new ways of artistic expression. I found out that there was also a musical Impressionist movement in that era, composers like Ravel and Debussy were at the forefront of the movement (that is the music that I’ve used in the promotional content of the series). There is something so special about experiencing paintings, photography and music from the same era in one single experience - and the concept of crossing and bridging different mediums that together comprise a cohesive overall vision is also a tie-in with our current digital art movement.
You’ve primarily worked with still images in the past. How was the experience of creating animated pieces different for you?
It has been quite a learning curve. I’m used to making things happen quickly through my collage practice, whereas creating frame-by-frame animation is extremely grueling and time-consuming. I’ve thus had to recalibrate my instant gratification expectations quite a bit! That said, learning new processes and methods is very rewarding and I’m happy that after so many years I’ve finally started a new practice with animation.
Can you tell us more about the themes, references, and subject matter in these works?
The Impressionists rebelled against the art establishment by avoiding the common academic and biblical motifs, and instead focusing on everyday ordinary scenes. Interestingly, so did Muybridge, so the motifs of the series were pre-established… to the extent that even in works of the series that contain modern footage, they are mundane scenes like a butterfly fluttering its wings, or a person scrolling through their phone - specimens plucked from everyday reality, rather than transcendental, larger-than-life subjects. He allowed us to see these things anew - which really at the end of the day is one of art’s major revelations and goals.
Is there a subtle detail in the collection that you think most people might miss but is meaningful to you?
The series as a whole might be perceived as nothing more than “pretty animated pieces with little to no meaning”, but there is a lot of depth behind them. Similarly, Impressionist works could be seen as pretty pictures, while the artists were in fact defiant and the works rebelled against academic ideals. I’m not saying that I’m a rebel or defiant, but rather making the point that the digital market is pushing against the established traditional art world in many ways.
What has The Present, your daily art project, taught you or brought to your practice over time?
This is a loaded question and one that is not easily answered. In a few words: it has reshaped my perception of what can be achieved in a single day, it has pushed me into new techniques, new styles, and most importantly it has taught me the importance of showing up every day to create. The act of showing up is how one attracts creative energy. Freedom precisely through discipline.