mendezmendez is the name under which Chema Mendez, a digital collage artist based in Spain, has created mixed digital media works since 2009.,His collages merge historical paintings and illustrations with photography, 3D renders and AI-generated content, remixing art history through a surrealist lens to explore perception and the human condition.
Before turning to collage, Mendez worked for years as a freelance graphic designer, producing websites, logos, flyers, album covers and event posters for clients. He began a personal collage practice in 2009, first sharing work on DeviantArt under the handle ChemaM before connecting with an online music production community that helped him start monetizing his art. In October 2020, one of his music industry clients sent him a link to Rarible, and he began minting on Ethereum shortly after, having already been running a mining rig with a friend.For much of his career he worked as a perfectionist, often spending weeks refining a single piece. In early 2024 he shifted to a daily creative practice built around fluid, intuitive collage-making. He draws on public-domain paintings and illustrations, photography, 3D renders, AI-generated content and his own sketches as source material.,His influences include the geometry of M.C. Escher, the surrealism of René Magritte, the paintings of Miles Johnston and the collage aesthetics of Eduardo Recife.
First Impressions connects Impressionism to digital animation, pairing pointillist textures drawn from paintings by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac with the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.The series was shown as a solo exhibition, “First Impressions”, at Offline Gallery in New York in August 2025.,It grew out of his daily project The Present, after he used a landscape painting by Alexander Kanoldt to create a looping collage of a moving hand, titled Reflex, that became its first work.In Vanitas he revisited the fleeting nature of earthly pleasure and the inevitability of death, incorporating 3D elements for the first time. Its central piece, I Guess I'll See You Next Lifetime, was released as a limited-time open edition of 296.Alien Intelligence explores non-human consciousness through the idea that life on Earth may have originated via panspermia, using AI tools to generate elements within collages built from centuries-old paintings and 3D components.Robert Mallary Portraits, produced jointly with Schmrypto's archive of the sculptor Robert Mallary and generative tools by Ombra, generates portraits that merge Mallary's works from the 1960s through the 1980s.
