

josé cardoso’s play-doh people meld molded matter with portrait photos

all images courtesy of josé cardoso

in homage to the gory visual effects found throughout artist chris cunningham and david cronenberg’s most famous films, graphic designer and illustrator josé cardoso has completed a collection of headshots that blends classic photography and basic sculpting. as a low budget tribute to old-school special effects from movies like ‘videodrome’ and ‘rubber johnny’, the porto-based artist mixes hand-sculpted play-doh with digital photographs to create strange and surreal portraits of himself, his family and his friends. these ‘faces’ bear warped and distored shapes crudely molded from malleable materials, seamlessly integrated into images of real human figures. while undeniably eerie and curiously bizarre, the images include strangely familiar facets of reality that are both recognizable and alien at the same time.