Thai artist Virut Panchabuse from Bangkok is known for his expressive pop-art portraits made entirely in collage technique. Born in 1980, Virut graduated with a BFA from the King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang, Bangkok.
Virut is an artist overflowing with creativity, he ditches the traditional oil brush for piles of colourful magazines cuttings. This successful formula sees tiny scraps of colourful paper, meticulously layered one next to the other to produce eye-popping portraits. His larger than life collages are complex and vivid, from a distance the portraits are almost hyperrealistic, viewed closely the original image softly dissolves into the layers of paper.
Virut begins his creative process online, where he scans through thousands and thousands of images we all are bombarded with every day. However he is not looking for faces that are beautiful nor famous, what he is searching for are emotions. “I believe this is what’s important in art – emotions. So I just look for images that evoke emotions, once I find them, I start sketching.”
The Artist celebrates the character and emotions of his subjects regardless of their gender, age and ethnicity. Each different, each unique but all full of emotions. The final product of Virut’s tedious practice, are very distant from the original source. Each portrait different & unique but full of emotion.
The original image disappears but the feeling remains. “I just borrow the mood of the photographs,” says Virut.
The massive collages are a hit amongst art collectors, His work is in prestigious collections such as that of Italian fashion giant Luciano Benetton or Chinese model Liu Dan. Virut’s works hanging on walls of art galleries and private homes around the world, from New Zealand to the US, from France to Hong Kong, China, India, Malaysia... the list is long. Having his art in all those places, admired by so many people, grant’s Virut his main wish as an artist – immortality. “When I die, my art will not die with me. This will be success for me.”