The most important tool of the assembly artist Sean Mackaoui is the scissors. With them, he removes images from their original context putting them together again, creating new, completely independent compositions. Anything can serve as raw material: photos, old advertisements or an anatomy atlas – everything is malleable in Mackaoui’s hands. In the best Dadaist tradition, he removes the images from their original contexts, intended meanings and purposes, freeing them from their chains of semantics, replacing them back together again in surprising, aesthetically coherent combinations.

To look into his works is to discover a vast territory where images that were never thought to be together before now coexist. In this sense, his way of working seems very similar to the one of poetry. Mackaoui is a visual poet of the scissors and his collages visual writings.

UNCHAINED is a journey of love understood through the prisms of this atypical and astute artist and just like the ever-expanding boundaries of love there is nothing limited or mechanical, nor any orderly fashion in the way each image has been created. The results are often peculiarly floating, eluding clear interpretations and definitions of meaning. Even so, each association has previously passed through the artists’ particular filter of instinct and reason and they express exactly what he wants to say, always in their own elective affinities.