I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with collage.  My first college art professor loved collage and it figured heavily in her basic drawing classes.  At the time, I found the cutting, arranging, and pasting pretty tedious.  I was more of a thrown some paint around a canvas kind of art student.. but I did love how flexible a collage composition could be.  In their work, French artistic duo Max and Adele of Atelier Bingo utilize collage, gouache, ink, screen print AND digital media to create abstract compositions as expressive as any painting.

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The flattened panes of bright color immediately reminded me of the famed collages of Henri Matisse— his Blue Nude remains one of my all time favorite pieces of art, ever.  The layering of such simplistic shapes assists our eyes in completing the composition.  No details are needed– we are allowed to fill in the blanks– but only by choice.

The flat planes of color are mixed playfully with pattern, keeping our eyes moving across the plane and helping us to add to the story our eyes are concocting along the way.

Want to see more work from Atelier Bingo?  Of course you do!  Check out their website, Tumblr and Facebook page.

All images via the artists’ website.  Artist found via It’s Nice That.