Artist Turns Renaissance Paintings, Digital Fragments, and Dream Logic Into Surreal Worlds That Feel More Like Memories Than Collages

Chema Mendez, is a self-taught surreal digital-collage artist from the Canary Islands. Since 2009, he has created layered images that merge the visual gravity of classical painting with photography, 3D renders, hand-drawn elements, and carefully selected AI-generated details. The goal is not to make collage look fragmented, but to make it feel like a fully resolved painting from an unfamiliar dream.

Mendez’s work sits between neo-surrealism and contemporary digital fine art. Renaissance oil paintings, historical illustrations, biodiversity books, religious symbols, landscapes, human figures, and digital textures are pulled into the same visual space, where their original meanings begin to shift. His stated influences include M.C. Escher’s geometry, René Magritte’s polished surrealism, Miles Johnston’s emotional dreamscapes, and Eduardo Recife’s textured collage language.

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